A non-stop day of culture

Twelve hours, one city, one huge festival – just how much of the Galway Arts Festival can Rosita Bolandcram into a single day?

11am

It’s one week into the 33rd Galway Arts Festival, the sun is shining, and I’m all set for a non-stop day of culture, my stamina carefully primed for the hours ahead with rashers, poached egg, and black pudding.

First up is the Fairgreen Gallery. Brian Bourke's show, Polyptych, is the anchor exhibit in this marvellous airy space. The goat skull series draws my eye immediately. There is an entire wall of 25 large pieces documenting the shape of the skull of a goat, with the precision of a forensic scientist and the imagination of an architect on an unlimited budget. I can't stop looking at these wonderful skulls, particularly the quartet on another wall, entitled Nature Morte/ Nature Vivante, where they float eerily on rectangles of electric blue.

Then I study the wall with Bourke's series Women Giving Birth To Men. I prefer the skulls.

There are three other artists' work on exhibit at the Fairgreen, including three "videotapes" by Bill Viola, and a film by Spike Jonze, all playing on a loop in a side-gallery. I take a seat in the darkness and watch two of Viola's tapes, Angel's Gate(1989), and Sodium Vapour(1979), on the astonishingly small screen. Images drift and pulse: a collapsing building; a baby's birth; a bearded man brooding silently on a bed (Viola?); the surreal lights of a city at night, a time when everything reverses and solidity disappears. The cumulative, seductive effect is like dreaming, or being under the surface of consciousness. I immediately want to watch them again.

On the way out, I look in the visitor’s book. “Loved Brian Bourke. The tension between angles and roundness. Bill Viola – empty self-indulgent rubbish,” one anonymous visitor has written. Jack Kelly “aged 8”, records that he thinks “The paintings were brilliant. Good job.” “Bill Viola on too small a screen,” complains B O’Brien. “Sorry, I didn’t understand anything,” apologises another anonymous visitor.

12.20pm

Today is not a day that Street Theatreis formally programmed for the festival, but this is Galway, and many unscheduled performers have arrived to take their own chances with the crowds. I am hardly three metres down Shop Street when an engaging man with a unicycle asks the assembled crowd for three volunteers to hold paraffin-lit torches. I raise my hand. It remains empty. One minute later, I am profoundly glad. The volunteers are required to toss the lit torches at unicycle man, who then catches and juggles them. With my aim, I'd have thrown the torch backwards and incinerated half the crowd.

Other things I see on Shop Street and High Street: a man who makes a dog out of sand; five sets of buskers; one solo singer murdering Will Ye Come to the Bower; and my favourite, an esoteric optimist outside Murphy's Bar who doesn't even bother singing: his act is literally a joke. He's "playing" a cardboard banjo, accompanied by his two cardboard dogs. Plink Plonk Plank is the name of Liverpudlian John Nelson's act. I don't know why I find it so funny, but I do.

1pm

I squash into a corner of the crowded Ruby Room at the King's Head on Shop Street for the daily Laughter Loftshow. Maeve Higgins, scheduled for today, has had to pull out, and Eric Lalor, who featured in Des Bishop's Joy in the Hood, is on the bill instead. Gerry Mallondoes MC. All I can say is that I laughed more at the man playing the cardboard banjo. Mallon's wheeze for relieving what he describes as "the tension in the room" is to invite everyone to hug the person next to them. I do not hug anyone.

“I did a gig in Howth Yacht Club a while ago,” Lalor tells us. “I was told to dress smart. So I arrived in a wheelchair, pretending I was Stephen Hawkins.”

2.30pm

I'm at the Galway Arts Centre, on Dominick Street. This is Alice Maher's first solo show in Galway, above, featuring specially commissioned animated films. All five films – Godchildren of Enantios, Flora, The Double, Sphinx, and Sleep– are a succession of images drawn in pencil on one piece of paper, and then erased. Bells chime, objects thud, rain falls, cries are muffled in Trevor Knight's atmospheric soundtrack, as Maher's trademark images of hair, bees, antlers, trees, fertility, cicadas and tents appear and disappear. It's strange and beautiful work, and also uneasy-making. I'm sorry to have missed her "Backstage at the Festival" talk about this work, which was four days previously.

3.50pm

At the Galway Museum, I salute the once-beheaded statue of Pádraic Ó Conaire that is missed so much from Eyre Square, and go looking for the Matisse show, Drawing With Scissors.

On exhibit are 35 lithographs of some of the famous paper cut-outs Matisse made in his 80s. They are prints and thus lack the unique potency of original work, but they're still a wondrous thing to see for free (all the visual art shows are free at the festival). The familiar blue nudes, above, are coolly elegant, the Snailcut-out is an explosion of form, and for me, there is a surprise in the lovely, vibrant Parakeet and the Mermaid, which I've never seen before; a version of which Matisse had painted on the walls of his apartment.

He could write, too: “Cutting directly into colour reminds me of a sculptor’s carving into stone.”

6pm

Bank of Ireland Theatreat NUI Galway. Full house. Electric Bridget company is Eileen Gibbons and Helen Gregg, above, each playing two characters, two set of twins, in their new show, The Grippe Girls.How could I not love this show from the start? It features an (unseen) female journalist. This declared bias aside, The Grippe Girlsis a marvel.

Aristocratic, elderly and crackers, twins Obstina and Hildegarde are telling their life story and family secrets to a visiting journalist, much to the dismay of their aged maids, also twins, Brigid and Margaret. Think Molly Keane's acerbic satire on the dysfunctional decaying Anglo-Irish, Good Behaviour.Animal hooves are involved, minus the animals. Whips. Shotguns. A ball gown. Tomato plants. Arrogance. Loyalties. Entitlement. Protection. This wonderfully compelling show will be even better in the future when it works out its intent more carefully: it doesn't need to be played so relentlessly for laughs. Things don't end well for the journalist, by the way.

8pm

Another full house, with very many people turned away. I'm sitting in the front row at the Druid Theatre, waiting for Enda Walsh's Penelopeto begin. More specifically, I'm sitting in the set: at the bottom of a sinister, drained swimming pool. A man in a pair of red Speedos (Karl Shiels) is blowtorching a sausage. It fleetingly reminds me that I haven't eaten since breakfast, before the non-stop switchback action of the 90-minute play takes over and I forget everything else.

Everyone who sees Penelope will get something different from this mesmerising, frenetic version of the Greek myth, which is studded with set pieces, notably Niall Buggy’s entranced speech about love.

For me, the wholly unexpected highlight was the brilliant, crazed parody by Shiels and Tadgh Murphy of the famous "Quick Change" couple from the reality show America's Got Talent. (Also, not getting splashed by the liquid props which were a) water b) lots of fake blood. Or more correctly, not splashed much.) "I'll have to think about that for a while," the man sitting next to me confides at the end of the show. Me too. I'm still thinking about it.

11pm

It's an arts festival. I end with a drink at the Festival Club, and some great conversation. Maybe it was two drinks.