Festival lacks highlights

THERE are some notable similarities between the Galway Arts Festival and the race week that follows it; in both cases you close your eyes, select what seems to be a likely winner, proceed in hope and feel cheated if it doesn't come up trumps. Last week the Festival's box office was deluged with calls from people demanding their money back, because their expectations of Kaddish by Towering Inferno had not been met.

From the programme it certainly seemed as if this multimedia evocation of the 20th century Jewish experience would be the most challenging and exciting production of the festival. Audience response seemed to be divided by age group; while there was a steady stream of people walking out of the opening night's performance, the show was more warmly received on subsequent nights, with the under 25s being the most enthusiastic.

It was the unanimously rapturous critical response to Kaddish in the British press that persuaded the Arts Festival board, whose members were jointly responsible for this year's programming, to bring the show to the Big Top. In retrospect, Patricia Forde, a former artistic director of the festival, and current board member, admits that it was a unsatisfactory to select a show without having seen it, and to rely on an edited video version.

"We don't like to have to do that, but sometimes you just have to risk it," she says. She agrees that the critical accolades were puzzling, for a production which, while intermittently effective, had an offputting self importance and excessive reliance for impact on the volume of the music, and the scale and repetition of images projected onto three screens.

With Kaddish down at the first hurdle, we went scrabbling for other favourites. Macnas, with their once off promenade production of Rhymes from the Ancient Mariner compensated through superb stagecraft for a slightly episodic treatment of Coleridge's symbolic poem, which lost its narrative clarity towards the end. But credit must go to its director, Rod Good all, and production manager Declan Gibbons for creating such an entrancing spectacle of ice, heat and rain from an unfinished warehouse, the new Black Box Performance Space on Dyke Road.

The company had to contend with a lack of dressing rooms and backstage storage facilities for props and sets, with no trussing from which to hang the lighting, no office space, no foyer and difficult acoustics. The transformation of the venue for the Ancient Mariner cost the Arts Festival and Macnas an extra £19,000, which they split between them. Funds have yet to be raised for the second phase of the building, which has an estimated cost of £250,000, but no timescale has been agreed for its completion.

THE General Manager of the Black Box, Mike Diskin, comments that "this kind of empty, experimental performance space is always going to entail high costs, but considering that Galway Corporation built it to a budget rather than a plan, and that the whole project has been plagued by theoretical problems concerning the way it's going to be used, it has been very valuable to see, through the Ancient Mariner show, what its potential will be when it is completed."

The three shows at Galway's other new venue, the Town Hall Theatre (also managed by Mike were a good test of its merits. Since it opened last October it has been highly attended, with an average house of 80 per cent. While its neo classical facade lends a sense of occasion to theatre going which had previously been lacking in this city, it is obvious, judging by the amount of space given over to stairs and offices and the inflexible formality of the auditorium, that it was not designed by theatre specialists.

This formality did not sit comfortably with the delicate, miniature puppet show presented by the Jordi Bertran Company, from Spain, making their second visit to Galway, but that did not affect the warmth of the audience's response to this charming, hour long, early evening show, Poemes Visuals. With imagination, ingenuity and humour the three puppeteers managed to be inventive with only a guitar, some whistles and a collection of foam alphabet letters, which came to life and leapt into balletie, choreographed sequences, manipulated with rods.

Annie Griffin's late night exploration of genre, gender and narcissism in film, It Is For My Mouth Forever, did not belong on a proscenium stage, but in a cavernous club. Griffin is a London based American performer and film maker who presented a clever, dryly humorous deconstruction of the conventions and assumptions of cinema - and of film promotion and criticism - using a silent film, with sound provided on stage by a pianist, an effects artist, and Griffin herself. Of minority interest, perhaps, but an interesting, if over extended piece which built up an increasing audience over its three nights.

The Swedish clown troupe Theater Manjana's version of The House of Bernarda Alba, lost Lorca somewhere along the way but filled the stage of the Town Hall with inventive mime and ensemble movement and was rewarded by full houses. Clowning, mime and puppetry is always well received at the festival which over the years has developed a strong bias in favour of physical theatre, exemplified on the home turf by Macnas.

This has been a healthy, perhaps necessary, reaction to our strong tradition of literary theatre in this country, yet, the Bernarda Alba show seems to indicate the limits of this approach and leave some of us clamouring for the return of the text. When the festival, admittedly only half way through, fails to throw up one central outstanding production, a clown version of a classic literary tragedy seems a weak offering. And the main production of the second half of the festival, Parade, from the Swiss company, Mummenschanz, will provide even more visual theatre, in a blend of mime, puppetry and light.

One strand of the festival to which clowning seems indispensable is Baboro, the children's festival. Rosy the Clown from England made a successful return to the Nun's Island Arts Centre, where some of the children in the audience were so familiar with her energetic performance that they were able to give a running commentary: "the next bit is brilliant The highlight of Baboro is still to come, with the Fred Garbo Inflatable Theatre Company, who will take over the Big Top on Wednesday.

EVERYONE knew the lines by heart too at Sunday night's Saw Doctors gig With dramatic lighting and an adoring audience, how could they go wrong, and only the stony hearted could fail to warm to the sheer chutzpah of a band who can transform the packed Big Top to a sea of swaying, waving limbs and heads, simply by repeating the lines "a small ball is your only mad".

Traditional music fans are not well catered for this year, in contrast to last year's feast, reflecting, Patricia Forde says, the board's attempt to broaden the mix of events and spread the audience base. This year's musical highlight for pop fans will be the outdoor Radiohead gig next Sunday.

For anyone susceptible to nostalgia it was a thrill to catch John Mayall at the Big Top, as this 62 year old and his Blues Breakers band pumped out the blues at their most raunchy and basic. That's one abiding memory of the first half of the 19th Galway Arts Festival, closely followed by the arresting draughtsmanship of Kathe Kollwitz at the UCG gallery, Bill Bryson's laconic, self deprecating reading in Druid Lane theatre, and the exquisite, soaring beauty of Zoe Maistre's trapeze flight as the Albatross in Macnas's Rhymes from the Ancient Mariner.