Galway Arts Festival

Various venues, Galway Jul 16-29 091-566577 galwayartsfestival.com

Any year in which the Galway Arts Festival features a new production from Druid – never mind one as extraordinary as DruidMurphy – epitomises the homegrown quality and international extent of its theatre programming. In the three Tom Murphy plays that make up the project. we get a deep-rooted history and psychology of Irish emigration and its consequence. But even if you take Druid out of the equation, the festival’s theatre strand is keen to measure the impact of the art locally, nationally and internationally.

Take Fishamble’s premiere production of The Great Goat Bubble (left), adapted for the stage by Julian Gough from an earlier short story, which uses the tale of a Somali economist who exploited “a structural discrepancy in the price of goats” as a satirical lens into the Irish financial crisis. Or the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of David Greig’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, a wonderfully theatrical feat of storytelling in which the life of academic is swallowed up by the logic (and rhyme) of a folk tale. Or, indeed, a co-production between the festival and Chicago’s Northlight Theatre on The Outgoing Tide, which may also count as a bid to repatriate the American actor and honorary Galwegian John Mahoney, a patron of the festival who has visited five times before.

Such wide concerns have always broadened the festival’s unique invitation: come to Galway, see the world.

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