Council fails to deliver on Kilroy play

ArtScape:Will Christ, Deliver Us see the light of stage this year? Thomas Kilroy's play exploring sexual oppression in the homes and industrial schools of 1950s Ireland - an adaptation of 1890s German classic Spring Awakening, by Franz Wedekind - sounds like a challenging work by one of our best playwrights. But a proposal to stage it has been turned down for Arts Council funds.

The council refused one-off funding for a proposed production by Classic Stage Ireland (CSI) and also a CSI application for support to commission further work on the play by Kilroy. CSI artistic director Andy Hinds says he finds the decisions "extraordinary and unacceptable". The Arts Council says it doesn't comment on individual applications.

The play, to be produced in association with Smashing Times Theatre Company, was to have had amini-tour of four Dublin venues (the Civic, Draíocht, Mill and Samuel Beckett theatres) in May, but this now looks unlikely. Hinds says no explanation was offered in the Arts Council's original letter of rejection of the application for ¤80,000 in production funding (the full budget is €160,000).

When asked by phone, the council's main reason was that it considered the project too ambitious and in need of more time for development. There was also said to be a lack of clarity about the CSI's intended payment scheme, but Hinds says this information was contained in the application.

The separate commissioning application for €10,000 for Kilroy to do further work on the play was also rejected. According to Hinds, the council claimed it was unclear whether the commission was from scratch or whether a script already existed. Hinds claims it wasmade clear that the script existed in an early form.

Thomas Kilroy - who has had no contact with the Arts Council, as the application was from CSI - said this week that he was very disappointed that the production had been turned down, particularly because of the nature of the play, which is of interest to teenagers and was to have involved younger people through the Smashing Times community theatre. The play is not about abuse but is set against the background of "that Ireland of the 1950s", which Kilroy feels still has currency for today.

This isn't the first time this play has caused a stir. At the Abbey in 2002 to celebrate Kilroy's work, and mark the publication of an Irish University Review issue on the playwright, actor Stephen Rea raised eyebrows when he criticised the Abbey for not producing Christ, Deliver Us, which it had commissioned.

Kilkenny selects top team

Colm Tóibín, Jimmy Fay, Catherine Leonard and Hugh Mulholland will be among the band of programmers putting the Kilkenny Arts Festival together this year. The festival is continuing to opt for a small panel of programmers from different art forms (under the co-ordinating hand of festival chief executive Geraldine Tierney) rather than a single artistic director.

Impac literary prize-winner Tóibín is programming literature events, violinist Catherine Leonard is curating classical music, theatre director Jimmy Fay is programming theatre, and gallery director and curator Hugh Mulholland is looking after visual art. They will join two of  last year's curators, Gerry Godley (jazz, world music and trad) and Emer McGowan (children and young people).

"It is so exciting to have such a wealth of experience and depth of creativity working together on next year's festival," says Tierney. "We already have much of the programme in place and I think the ideas and plans under way are challenging, exciting and invigorating."

Kilkenny Arts Festival runs from Aug 10 to 19

Bringing us Out to Lunch

TS Eliot may have judged April to be the cruellest month but the folks at Belfast's Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival (CQAF) reckon it is definitely January, writes Jane Coyle. However, in the view of director Sean Kelly, "it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness", so they have decided to bring us Out to Lunch for a second year, starting this weekend.

This mini-festival was held for the first time last year in a temporary venue and was intended to be a one-off. To the surprise of the organisers, however, every event sold out. Such is the appetite in Belfast for the exotic delights emanating from the CQAF that Out to Lunch has now been expanded into a three-week affair, to be held in the exciting permanent space of the Cathedral Quarter's Black Box.

"We initially wondered if people would come out to events in January," says Kelly. "But they seemed to really want to do something different and creative after the Christmas break. We are finding new audiences all the time and this festival is a means of giving a short, sharp dose of the arts, with lunch thrown in - and all for just £5 (€7.40) a time. More importantly, it places Belfast alongside other European cities where arts events are on offer throughout the year and at different times of the day." Among the lunch-hour delights will be comedy from Owen O'Neill, Karola Gajda's humorous reminiscences of her Polish immigrant parents, readings by broadcaster and columnist Jon Ronson, alternative poetry from the Poetry Chicks, a visit from Children's Laureate Jacqueline Wilson, music from Four Men and a Dog, the Children of Soweto Gospel Choir and Foy Vance, and a show which was the talk of last year's Edinburgh Fringe, Jesus: The Guantánamo Years.

 Out to Lunch runs until Jan 28. Details: 028-9023-2403 or www.cqaf.com

Cork opportunities

Strongly associated with London's Arcola Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, William Galinsky has arrived in Cork to take up his appointment as director of the Cork Midsummer Festival, writes Mary Leland.

"This is a job which might almost have been created for me," he says, adding that through his Sligo-born wife, Ireland has been an important part of his life. He visited Cork when working with Wolf Mankowitz on his play, The Hebrew Lesson, some years ago. Galinsky's international credits include The Winter's Tale for Hayu-Za Theatre, Tokyo, which toured to Russia, Romania and France, and Season of Migration to the North for the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2005 NewWork Festival. An associate artist of the Arcola Theatre, he says the rehearsal room can be a lonely place and that he has been looking for the chance to create something bigger than a single production. He is, he adds, looking forward to "the opportunity to give people an opportunity".

Some of those "people" were at the launch this week of the Cork Opera House's new season. Among them was Sarah Buckley, the festival's acting manager, replacing Dyane Hanrahan, who is on maternity leave. The line-up for the Opera House includes two new plays: Sean McCarthy's Father Mathew, presented by Yew Tree Theatre in association with the Opera House at the Half Moon from January 15th, and Sunbeam Girls in a Stage Centre presentation from February 14th. Visiting productions include The Lieutenant of Inishmore, also in February, with Disney's Beauty and the Beast in March and Bruiser Theatre Company's The Canterbury Tales in April. Also in April comes another revival of I, Keano.

• These are busy times for Druid Theatre, with plans for a co-production with the Royal Court of Lucy Caldwell's Leaves opening in London on March 14th and The Playboy of the Western World opening in Tokyo just days later (March 22nd). Leaves won young Belfast-born writer Caldwell the George Devine Award last year, and will be directed by Garry Hynes, whose production of Brian Friel's Translations previewed at Biltmore Theatre in New York this week. Meanwhile, managing director Fergal McGrath is set to leave Druid, moving to Galway-based independent film production company Magma Films, where he'll also be MD.

•Following Polly O'Loughlin's departure, Martin Murphy this month takes over as theatre director at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire. Director, performer and writer, Murphy has worked in theatre in Ireland for 20 years, including stints with Rough Magic and as artistic director of Team Theatre Company. Films he's been in include The Tiger's Tail, Michael Collins and Braveheart (in which 1,600 blue-painted Scotsmen mooned at him). He is married to writer Anne Enright and they live in Bray, Co Dublin, with their two children.