North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Galway Arts Festival

Whew! It’s been a long and busy week, with lots of things happening during the Arts Festival.

Last week, I went to see Our Country’s Good, in the UCG BOI theatre. The play tells the story of the first boatload of convicts deported from Britain to Australia. Guarded by a troop of resentful and capricious Marines, justice is administered by a pompous but well-meaning governor. The governor has two problems; how to maintain discipline with the prisoners and his troops, and how to prepare to them for their future life. Because, though the prisoners are used as practically slave labour to convert the outpost into a colony, they will become citizens of this same new world once their sentences have been served.

Based on a book by Thomas Kenneally called “The Playmaker”, the splendidly-named Timberlake Wertenbaker has crafted a passionate critique of the dehumanising effect of harshly administered justice. In short, a self-serving and homesick British officer, attempting to curry favour with the Governor, puts on a play using convicts as his cast. As the rehearsals progress (and the obstacles to its opening night mount), he begins to see his cast not as criminals but as fellow human beings, and the convicts themselves begin to think of themselves as people again. But her play is equally a play of hope – its thesis is that kindness begets kindness, that redemption is within the grasp of any man or woman and that, ultimately, humanity will shine through.

The play was put on by the Galway Youth Theatre, and I suspect that one of the reason that it was chosen was that the large number of roles enabled the entire company to get a fair crack of the whip (literally in this case). There was an awful lot to like about this production. The set was very cleverly designed – a large expanse of curved wooden decking over an expanse of sand that served as both the deck of a ship as well as the various buildings of the colony. Given that the theatre is rather small to begin with, the shape of the set meant that the audience were very close to the stage, and for a couple of scenes, the performances took part between sections of the audience. Given the intensity of the material and the performances, the proximity between players and audience added a certain frisson to the proceedings.

There are noticeable weaknesses, the most obvious is that there are just too many characters and subplots in the play, carried over from the novel. The play does try to cover a lot of themes – quite a part from the fate of the convicts, most of them guilty of only petty theft and subject to appalling floggings or hanging for even the most minor breaches of discipline. There is also the fate of the women convicts who also have the dilemma of resorting to prostitution in return for more food or better conditions, and some of the women also have become ‘second wives’ to soldiers who also have a family back home in Blighty. Through in the fate of the Native Australians (reduced to a few laughable vignettes of an Aborigine uttering Yoda-like riddles), the moral dilemma of the soldiers troubled by what they are ordered to inflict on the prisoners, as well as the mutterings of mutiny and dissatisfaction of the troops because they feel abandoned on the other side of the world, and that’s a pretty cluttered play. It means that there are a lot of scene transitions in the play (cleverly handled by the GYT) and a number of the subplots are either rushed or never satisfactorily resolved. The play would not have suffered from a ruthless pruning of the script.

Given the large number of roles and actors, the standard of the acting varies, but some performances shone very brightly indeed. The two main actresses of the play within the play are outstanding, though it should be said that all of the actors portraying the convicts put in solid performances, as does actor portraying the officer staging the show. Though the play does tend towards the polemic at times, there’s no denying its power, and one scene achieves that transformation you always hope for when going to the theatre – where you forget all about the artifice of the stage and the gap between the players and the audience. There is a scene where one of the officers, who despises convicts, turns up to terrorise the cast that have been picked for the play. He hold the ultimate power over all of them – he can have any one of them flogged to death and is only interested in utterly humiliating them, each one in turn. As he struts about the stage, and the convicts cower on their knees before him, even the audience hardly dared to draw breath. Great stuff, and the scene stayed with me long after I had got back to my car and set course for home.

Francis bores for England.

The following night, a war of a different nature was the topic for Francis Wheen’s public talk in the Radisson. He has written a book, “How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the world” (which I have not read) and his lecture sets its sight on a broad range of mumbo-jumbo-like topics:- astrology, feng-sui, creationism, new Age religions, even Tony Blair’s political Third Way theory. Alas, though the lecture promised much, it delivered little (a bit like many of the topics in the book, then). Wheen spent a lot of time setting the scene; the history of the Enlightenment before mentioning all to briefly some examples of what irks him. I have to say that I was hugely disappointed by this talk – in his defence, I got the impression that he had lost track of time before really getting into his stride. Nevertheless, he didn’t really develop any coherent point during the lecture. He mentioned George W Bush’s uncritical attitude to Creationism, but didn’t really contrast it with his promotion and continued support of NASA, an organization singularly dedicated to the notion that the world wasn’t created in 6 days flat. Wheen also mentioned the fact that Nancy Reagan’s belief in astrology and Cherie Blair’s belief in ,well, quite a lot of things, but he doesn’t really make a case either way for whether their respective husbands actually believed that stuff too or were just humouring their wifes for a quiet life. He has a pop at new Age religions but dodges the big question of what exactly constitutes the difference between a nutty religion and a respected one.

There wasn’t much enlightment provided by the Q&A session afterwards, other than a rather meandering speech on the relative values of Modernism and post-Modernism. Yes, it was that interesting.

Lighter and more entertaining fare was promised at a talk by John Lahr in the Town Hall theatre on Saturday afternoon, who writes profiles for the New Yorker magazine. As a child, he knew Groucho Marx, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and has met many comedians and entertainers in his working life. Lahr has probably thousands of great showbiz stories – too bad he didn’t tell us any of them. Instead, as he began his talk, he intended to explore the comedic DNA of great artists – what was it that drove them to such excellence? Admittedly, his account of the early struggles of Chaplin and Keaton was very interesting, particularly his description of how the immigrant Chaplin (from England) could hardly believed the energy and speed at which ordinary life was lead in America, and how it inspired his act. But Lahr was a lot less convincing with his thesis that it was a primal violent urge, given vent through their acts that drove these comedians, and when he began invoking Nietzsche and Freud, there wasn’t too many laughs. I wasn’t really convinced by his theory (there are lots of damaged people and lots of poor people but most of them lack the talent and genius to become legendary comics) but I would have settled for an entertaining one. Later, he attempted to explain the humour of Woody Allen by retelling some his jokes and then analysing them by breaking them down into an equation of a + b = c. Dear God, an academic trying to explain jokes via algebra would be exactly the sort of thing that Woody would skewer.

The pity was that, during the Q&A session afterwards, he livened up and became animated talking about comics that he liked and even more lively talking about comics he didn’t like (Johnny Carson and Bob J Hope, take a bow). If only he had shown the same passion during the talk itself. Two things I have to mention: one was his insistence that Barry Humphries (Dame Edna Everage) is a comic genius. If he is, then so is Freddie Starr. The other is that he is the spitting image of his father, Bert, who played the role of the Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz.

I doubt if John Lahr would be tempted to write about the comedy on offer in the Radisson last Sunday. Barry Murphy’s Comedy Circus played to a full house in the Radisson ballroom (complete with slow-motion bar staff) and poor fare it was too. There’s a simple rule for any show; the opening and closing items should be memorable. Maybe I just didn’t get the memo that announced to the world that standing on stage wearing a fake wig and miming to some anodyne heavy metal tune for what seemed like an age is hilarious, but it looked like no-one else in the place had got it either. They did this for both the opening and closing act. The idea of the comedy circus was that Murphy would introduce the other acts, as well as do a few routines himself. And by God, was it routine. Murphy, Dermot Carmody, Kevin Gildea and Ian Coppinger hardly seemed to bother, and the material was either stuff that Murphy had used at the Festival last year, or just plain bad. The one redeeming feature was the Men in Coats act from the UK, whose physical, inventive comedy got a great reception. And another thing, Barry, the phrase 'comedy circus' would not normally also imply the phrase 'Aonghus McNally', who appeared twice during the night, and was even less funny the second time than the first.

The Bejing Dance Academy wowed everyone at the Black Box last weekend – I wasn’t so keen on the venue, which was like a sauna. And I rounded off the week with Trad in the Druid Theatre on Friday. I remember seeing a late night showcase of new comics at the Cat’s Laugh Festival in Kilkenny seven or eight years ago – Tommy Tiernan made an appearance, as did the afore mentioned Kevin Gildea, as well as a very nervous Mark Doherty. It looks like he has eschewed stand-up for acting and writing, and Trad is his latest production. Trad starts off as a Flann O’Brien styled slice of surrealism and sends-up the Fadó Fadó in Eireann style of storytelling but it gets more serious as it progresses. It ells the story of an old man and his 100 year old son who confesses that he has a son that he has never met. Together, they go off looking for him. The play seems to me like a work in progress – and lacks a balance between the comic and the serious. On the plus side, you get to see another great performance from Frankie McCafferty. Actually his costars (Peter Gowen and David Pearse) are equally good, and I suspect, given some tweaking, there is in Trad a much better play struggling to get out. A good end to the festival.

UPDATE 23rd January 2005 - My suspicions of Francis Wheen have been further fortified.

Posted by Monasette at July 26, 2004 12:11 PM