Like all good arts festivals, this year's Galway fortnight made you look at life anew. Rosita Boland reports on the highlights of the event's final week
One event defines each Galway Arts Festival. Last year it was James Thiérrée and Compagnie du Hanneton's surreally beautiful and inspirational Junebug Symphony. This year it was Trad, the marvellously weird first play by the comedian and actor Mark Doherty, about tradition and the relationships between fathers and sons.
Mikel Murfi's direction elicited outstanding performances from Peter Gowan, Frankie McCafferty and David Pearse. It is a compliment to all involved to acknowledge that Trad is a difficult show to define; it is perhaps best described as a reversible drama, alternating between the lightness of moments of pure classic comedy and the darkness of something much more haunting and complex. Watching Trad is like doing a jigsaw without having the picture to guide you: all the pieces are there, but you're not sure what's going to emerge.
More than any other show of the festival, Trad generated conversation and discussion: it excited people, and it deserves now be seen by a wider audience. It was by far the most-sought after ticket of the fortnight. Doherty is not a new name, but he is new to writing for theatre - and has proved himself immensely talented at doing so. His next play - there has to be a next play - will be a must-see.
The other talked-about show was Compagnie du Hanneton's second appearance at Galway, with La Veillée Des Abysses at the Black Box. When the man with crutches sitting in front of you gets up to take part in the standing ovation you know a show has really meant something. The brilliant Thiérrée is not just an extraordinary performer with a seemingly elastic body; in devising these shows he also demonstrates a visual imagination so rich that it in turn enriches the audience. The opening and closing scenes in particular, of storms at sea, were unforgettable masterpieces of technical beauty.
Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company played at lunchtimes in the Town Hall Theatre with Orange Flower Water, Craig Wright's one-act play, directed by Rick Snyder. This story of two Minnesota couples, each with an unfaithful spouse who are forming a third and new couple, had a tight script that perfectly reflected the tight dimensions of the world these four people live in. Word of mouth sold the show out after the first of seven performances. Darrell W. Cox, Molly Glynn, Whitney Sneed and Christian Stolte provided a quartet of excellent performances, twisting like the string in a cat's cradle as they demonstrated their different understandings of what love, commitment and sex meant to each of them.
As part of the Showcase Galway series Conor McDermottroe presented Swansong, his one-man show, at the Town Hall Studio. It is the story of the self-destructive Occi, whose first instinct when challenged is violence rather than debate. Occi attempts to redress the brutality of words - being called a bastard, in the literal sense of the word - with physical brutality, which puts him for a time into a mental hospital. "An awful kip, the mental. Nearly went mad there." Swansong has some frustratingly fine moments - frustrating because overall it's a patchy, overlong show that would have benefited enormously from the objective eye of a director other than the performer himself.
Josh Tobiessen's site-specific piece Parallel Parking takes place in the Hynes Yard car park, moving between three locations there. The space is used well - go to the top of the car park for the best view in Galway - but the piece itself is a slight one about the interweaving lives of a thug, a photographer, an airhead wannabe model and photographer, a weather girl and a gombeen-like temp. Directed by Paul Haze, the show is made by Paul Bonar's engaging comic performance as the eejit temp, determined to carry out his duties in the face of all difficulties - including the possibility of having his arms broken.
Rod Goodall presented An Evening With Samuel Johnson, his adaptation of Kay Eldridge's play Your Obedient Servant, at the Kings Head Theatre Bar. It wasn't the first outing of this production, but nonetheless it was a good, solid evening's entertainment, with a fine performance by Goodall, who played both Johnson and his biographer, James Boswell, as he explored some of the highlights of Johnson's life. Goodall was also served wonderfully by the intimate space he worked in, which had the good fortune to have an exposed stone wall. This served as a perfect period backdrop and, lit by candles, contributed greatly to the atmosphere of the piece, as did Nuala Ní Chanainn's accompanying violin music.
Galway Youth Theatre presented Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good and Neil La Bute's monologues Medea Redux and Iphigenia In Orem, all directed by Andrew Flynn. At the Town Hall Theatre Bar Patricia Bohan played the demanding part in Medea Redux, dressed in the now infamous orange jumpsuit of an American-run prison. Bohan did a very good job of a difficult part - the story of a mother killing her son - although retaining the Deep South accent proved a distraction.
The Radisson Hotel ballroom was again the venue for several big concerts. A hotel ballroom is an unforgiving space for performances: frankly, it's difficult to get wedding hats and turkey dinners out of your head.
It was also hard to get the thought of turkey from the head when Bill Wyman and The Rhythm Kings showed up for their gig. Lurking in the background and seeming to do very little except scowl periodically, Wyman displayed virtually no stage presence in their set of covers. The real star was Beverley Skeet, a fantastic soul singer who wowed the crowd and put the rhythm back into The Rhythm Kings.
The following night Mozaik provided a terrific concert of varying styles of traditional music. Stage presence was no problem here, with all five musicians more or less elbowing each other into the spotlight by turn. Andy Irvine and Donal Lunny were joined by the American Bruce Molsky, the Hungarian Nikola Parov and the Dutchman Rens van der Zalm for a hugely energising evening of ensemble and individual performances.
Highlights included Irvine's superb rendition of The Blacksmith, Molsky's technically demanding feat of simultaneously fiddling and singing solo Green Grows The Laurel, Parov's piping and some Balkan dance tunes.
A performance by the guitarists Bert Jansch - a master of the modern instrument - and Bernard Butler, formerly of the Britpop group Suede, was a more muted affair that never really took off despite the musicians' considerable talents. The playing was technically faultless, but the duo never quite connected with the crowd, and the result was a bit like watching people rehearsing through a window.
The Róisín Dubh's lunchtime and evening trad gigs proved as popular as ever - and it felt wonderfully unfamiliar to be there in a smoke-free atmosphere. Maigh Seola, who played at lunchtime on Friday, have only recently released their first album, Beyond The Morning Wall. Bríd Dooley and Áine Sheridan ended their set with a Kerry polka, We Won't Come Home Till Morning, which they introduced as being a suitable description of many people's experience of the festival.
One of the events billed as a Galway highlight was a reading by the controversial Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who is now 71. Yevtushenko has possibly as many critics as he does admirers: for every person who admires Babi Yar, his 1961 denunciation of Nazi and Soviet anti-Semitism, which helped alert a wider world to the horrors of the Soviet regime, there is another who suspects him of being a political mouthpiece. Political and moral questions aside, Yevtushenko's work is translated into a staggering 72 languages, so his reading was always going to attract a large and curious crowd.
Yevtushenko was joined on stage by the pianist Tristan Ryder and the singer Flo McSweeney, who spoke several of the English translations. "Music is part of the content of a poem which you lose in translation," he told the audience, explaining that the musicians would supply the missing element. The reading started with a beautiful rendering with McSweeney of the love poem Sleep My Beloved. Reading some of the older poems addressing events in the Soviet Union, such as Goodbye Our Red Flag, Yevtushenko described his writing of them as "cutting doors in the Iron Curtain". He also read a fragment from a new poem, entitled Bullfighter.
At the height of his fame Yevtushenko read to football stadiums, and as the evening progressed it became evident that he thrives on a crowd. Yevtushenko is a poet but also a showman. The reading turned into a bizarre performance, with Yevtushenko going out into the audience, like a cabaret singer, and kissing women of mature years. He introduced his final three pieces with the line: "It is better to feed you with a soup spoon than a ladle."
The evening ended with him berating a bewildered-looking Ryder and waltzing round the stage with a heroic and clearly disconcerted McSweeney while belting out Lara's Theme from the film of Dr Zhivago: trowel rather than soup spoon or ladle was the object that came to mind.
For all this Yevtushenko received a standing ovation, albeit from only a portion of the crowd; the audience was afterwards divided about whether the ovation was heartfelt or a sign of some people's desperation to leave.
On the last two nights of the festival The Walls, one of Ireland's most talented bands - still, mysteriously, unsigned by a major label - played at the Taibhdhearc. The gigs were preceded by The Birth Of Frank Pop, an old short film directed by Joe Wall and starring Frankie McCafferty. Then, straight from the stage of Trad, McCafferty appeared live to sing the film's deadpan title number, much to the hilarity of the crowd. "We've been upstaged already and the gig hasn't even started yet," said Steve Wall. The Walls, who have just finished their second album, gave a cracking performance.
Also towards the end of the week the Australian street-theatre company Snuff Puppets performed two pieces, Boom Family and Cows. The life-size herd of cows wandered into McDonald's, fazing staff and entertaining customers. The five-member outsized Boom family had the dogs in the street barking at them as they sprawled over trucks and vans (with unwary drivers inside) and looked through first-floor windows on Shop Street at astonished customers within.
The festival's unofficial chief visual spectacle was surely the huge, messy, mysterious installation that is currently Eyre Square. This year, also, the festival sold a third of its tickets over the Internet, and many of the shows sold out. Rose Parkinson, the festival's director, says the festival hit its financial target, breaking even some days before it was due to end.
On Friday a man emerged from a manhole on Shop Street as I was walking past. Along with other passers-by I stood and waited for whatever piece of street theatre was going to happen next. As he climbed out and stood up the man looked a little bewildered at all the attention. He was actually a council worker just doing his job. Which is the joy of good arts festivals: they make you look at the world differently.
