Every cloud has a silver lining

Even floods couldn't dampen the spirits of Galway Arts Festival. Rosita Boland rounds up the highlights of this year's event

The delicious surprise of Galway Arts Festival this year had to be when the city's Spanish Arch became art, doubling as the head of the playwright Tom Murphy in an extraordinary one-off installation by the French artist Bernard Pras. Seeing Murphy "encountering his own face" was the highlight of the fortnight for Rose Parkinson, the festival's director.

Murphy's version of The Drunkard, a 19th-century piece by W. H. Smith and A Gentleman, was his first play premiere in Galway since Bailegangaire in 1985, and a key show of the festival's first week. Directed by Lynne Parker, it prompted Fintan O'Toole to observe in these pages: "Murphy's ear is finely attuned to the glories and absurdities of melodramatic exclamation, and even while he is wringing out its ludicrous overstatement he is also making it sing" (at the Everyman Palace, Cork, until Saturday, then Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin, next week.)

This year's festival was notable for both the range of its programme and the number of new co-productions, including Nils-Udo, The Drunkard (with B*spoke), Hurl and The Mysteries. New work is essential to the life of a festival, and Galway, happily, seems committed to programming it. "The festival wants to create new, original work; it is easier to bring in ready-made work, but the festival is about much more than that," says Parkinson. "Also, with a co-production, you can make something specific to Galway."

Running throughout the festival were two marvellously arresting visual-arts shows: Pras's photographs of his head installations, at the Aula Maxima, and photographs by the German land artist Nils-Udo of his Connemara bog sculptures, at Galway Arts Centre. Looking at Pras's photographs of his amazingly original versions of famous faces, you can't help wondering whether, if you offered him dinner, he would eat it or turn it into an installation, so inventive is his eye for the possibilities of the most unpromising of materials - toilet rolls for Louis XIV's ermine-trimmed robe and Guinness cans for the curls of his wig.

Nils-Udo's show (a festival/Galway Arts Centre co-production) is a series of beautiful, haunting images of work he made during three wet weeks in Connemara this year. Steps carved into the side of a bog go nowhere or everywhere; a bank of turf conceals a stone wall, thus becoming a bearing wall itself; a person appears to be mysteriously growing out of a deserted, light-soaked bog.

Apart from The Drunkard, other major shows in the first week included Barabbas's Hurl, by Charlie O'Neill, a co-production with Dublin Theatre Festival, and The Mysteries, produced by Macnas and Coventry's Belgrade Theatre and directed by Mikel Murfi and Richard Hayhow. Hurl, a physical show based round the idea of foreigners playing our very national game, will also be at Dublin Theatre Festival in October.

Nils-Udo was not the only artist struggling to work in the rain. The festival's first week brought the worst July weather since 1966, with floods forcing the cancellation of two outdoor performances of The Mysteries and two of Four Riders, a street spectacular based on the story of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Stalker, an Australian theatre company.

In place of the much-missed (for the second year) festival parade, Macnas undertook the bravely ambitious Mysteries. A year in production, with a cast of 92 and a terrific set piece of Ark animals, the show got a muted reception both critically and from audiences, with some people complaining of poor visibility and acoustics. The chief disappointment, however, must be that two performances were cancelled. No matter what the merits of a show, it simply doesn't exist unless performed. Hard questions need to be asked about staging shows of this scale outdoors; balancing the unpredictability of the Irish weather with artistic freedom proved to be a risk not worth taking.

The festival hit was The Junebug Symphony, a French production created by James Thiérrée, a grandson of Charlie Chaplin and also one of its four main performers. This startlingly inventive piece of physical theatre, based loosely on a dream, was joyously performed and rapturously received. Its many beautiful images came at the audience like scenes from a magic lantern: a gorgeous show that enriched the imagination of everyone who saw it.

Another hit was Paris Texas, a stage "short" version of Wim Wenders's 1984 film by a local company, POC Productions, with Diarmuid De Faoite and Lara Ní Chathmhaoil, at the Town Hall Studio. This dreamlike 35-minute show felt longer, so wide was the emotional range of the beguiling performances. It was a festival jewel that gave each of the 10 members of the audience a unique experience, as they watched from peep-show booths.

In the second week, an unnerving, edgy interpretation of Bruce Norris's play Purple Heart, staged by Chicago's celebrated Steppenwolf Theatre Company and directed by Anna Shapiro, provided a quartet of memorable performances from Laurie Metcalf, Rosemary Prinz, Matt Roth and Lucas Ellman. One can only imagine what advice was given by Prinz, a stage veteran of 55 years, here playing an ostrich-like grandmother, to the remarkable 12-year-old Ellman, convincingly obnoxious as the overburdened only child of an alcoholic mother and dead Vietnam-soldier father.

As part of the umbrella Galway Showcase of new work, the Galway veteran Little John Nee teamed up with the director Simon Sharkey for his new show, Salt O' The Earth, which featured music by Kevin Duffy. Through songs, impressions and monologues we were told the story of Johnny Bonner, a wandering, self-destructive Scotsman. Nee is a genius at impressions; with just a woman's hat he became an uncannily convincing granny, and his version of two old men in a bar shooting the breeze about the weather was a mesmeric and hilarious highlight.

But there was not enough of this. The one-man show, which runs to almost two hours, rambles, repeats itself and goes on too long. Part of the problem for Galway audiences is that we've already seen bits and pieces of similar material over the years. Nee has many talents, but they aren't focused to his best advantage in Salt O' The Earth.

"It's hard to satirise events that satirise themselves," said the US cartoonist Dan Perkins - a.k.a Tom Tomorrow - at a presentation of his work, via video clips and animations. Perkins draws a weekly social and political cartoon, This Modern World, which is syndicated to 150 newspapers in the US. In Little John Nee's show, people mourn and make photographic shrines when the death of Kennedy is announced on radio. The central subject of Perkins's lampoons is President Bush; they are a keen reminder of how, within four decades, mass media have become formidable, double-edged public weapons, so potentially powerful that, since September 11th, Perkins's provocative work is no longer carried by one of his old employers, the New Yorker.

In other talks and readings, the author Pat McCabe gave his first public reading from his novel Call Me The Breeze, which is published in September. A day later, the British publisher John Calder held court, reporting with something like pride that he was being sued by various writers mentioned unfavourably in his memoir, Pursuit. Calder set up his publishing house in 1949, and his authors included Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs. Small publishers, he said, were being replaced by "literary agents and accountants". The best tool a small publisher could have to succeed was time to make contacts with the few remaining independent booksellers.

Galway Youth Theatre produce consistently interesting shows at festival time. This year, remarkably, all three of its shows (also part of the Galway Showcase) were directed by Andrew Flynn. Its version of Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan, with Caoilinn Hughes as Portia, in the first week got particularly good word of mouth. It also staged Lovely Betty at lunchtime and Corn Exchange's Car Show. Two of Car Show's four playlets, performed in a car for an audience of three, were new, written by Galway Youth Theatre's production manager - and first-time writer - John McKenna. Clown But Not Out, featuring two young women working as underappreciated clowns for children's parties, was a powerful, economical and spot-on vignette of teenage tensions, ambitions, troubled friendships and confused sexuality, with very fine performances from Aideen O'Donnell and Sorcha Nevin. McKenna's other show, Love Bites, about a pair of drunken girls dissecting their love life after a night out, was less successful. Although Deirdre Hayes in particular turned in a lovely, assured performance, complemented by Katherine Graham, the script wandered aimlessly, ending with a dreadful cliché.

Catastrophe Theatre Co performed Up The Yard, written by Josh Tobiessen and directed by Paul Haze, a site-specific show in a yard outside the Army & Navy Stores. Three odd homeless people - Tracy Bruen, Bairbre De Barra, Duncan Lacroix - living there are joined by an outsider (Tobiessen), to whom they show how small and strange both their world and minds have become, with horrible results. This perfectly located show is a brave if uneven attempt to examine boundaries - physical, social, personal.

On the musical side, one of the earliest sell-outs were the Waterboys, particularly their gig in the ever-atmospheric RóisíDubh. The puckish trio of Mike Scott, Steve Wickham and Richard Naiff put on an extra lunchtime gig on the second Friday. Despite the earliness of the hour, the audience climbed abroad the Strange Boat and sailed off into the waves of The Girl In The Swing, Sweet Thing, Fisherman's Blues, Room To Roam and others. It could have been 1993 instead of 2003, but who cared?

Word of mouth had it that the guitarist and music producer Arty McGlynn gave a classic performance at the end of the first week, joined by many famous trad names, including Nollaig Casey, Liam O'Flynn, Frankie Gavin, Matt Molloy and Sean Keane. The fiddler and singer Máiréad Ní Mhaonaigh and accordion player Dermot Byrne shared a bill with the brilliant Spanish piper and flautist Carlos Nunez at his playful stormer of a concert a week later. There was more physical theatre from the Australian ensemble Acrobat (see review, right).

Among some of the best of the rest of the extensive programme was Ester Williams, a series of pigs by Anne Ferrer, floating like a surreal pink lily on Eglinton Canal (one had to be repaired after being vandalised on the first night of the festival); Jimmy Higgins, the former showband manager, put on a hugely popular exhibition of showband memorabilia at the box office; Don't Sleep, Teatro Punto's lunchtime show, was engaging and entertaining; the comedian Tommy Tiernan was in great form trying out his new Edinburgh show - fresh material on his familar subjects of sex, religion and schooldays - for a remarkable 12 lunchtimes at Druid Theatre; the lunchtime trad sessions at the RóisíDubh were as popular as ever; Barry Murphy and Ian Coppinger departed from solo stand-up in their show and entertainingly "did" a Galway festival spoof; and Joe Boske, who has designed many Galway Arts Festival posters, had his second solo show, Night Watch, at Mulligan record shop.

It's estimated that Galway Arts Festival brings €1 million to the city each day. This year's festival cost €1.3 million, which was projected to come from grants, sponsorship - Guinness is the major backer - and box-office revenue. On the last weekend of the festival, festival manager John Crumlish was estimating it would break even.

The festival's Arts Council funding was due to increase by 25 per cent this year - the last of a three-year cycle - but it remained at last year's level (€331,000). "It wasn't just ourselves that were affected by funding," Parkinson points out. "It was also some companies we were working with in co-productions, such as Macnas." Some shows had to be modified as a result, but nothing was cancelled. Like every other major arts organisation in Ireland, Galway Arts Festival is unsure what lies ahead with the Arts Council once final figures for this year's festival are available: it is not the only festival whose funding is now at the end of a cycle.

Meanwhile, nobody will ever look at the Spanish Arch again without remembering the time it became Tom Murphy's head. Festival shows move on, but the collective memory endures, and this year Galway provided lots of good memories.