It’s when sitting gratefully on one of the few chairs in the Musgrave auditorium of the Firkin Crane Dance Centre that the location awareness of some producers included in this year’s Cork Midsummer Festival programme becomes convincingly obvious.
The setting for the premiere of A Safe Passage, Irene Kelleher’s new play, is an island lighthouse and the design by Hannah Lane has us immediately in that claustrophobic rock-grown tower. Even though Lane is helped by the rotund shape of the theatre itself, she ensures a physical sense of enclosure, a sealed atmospheric into which Sean O’Rourke’s staunch keeper fits as if all his corners have been sheared off. Appropriately grizzled and gruff in a pattern of a life at sea but not seagoing he expresses a fortitude which seems as impregnable as the tower itself.
Only seems: a personified conscience emerges from wind and storm, a Goth-like Lorelei played by Kelleher in a flirtation both erotic and dangerous. Tension builds as the keeper drifts from warden to prisoner and the invader prowls like a weary shape-shifter. Powered by Cormac O’Connor’s sound design and the swerving lighting from Tim Feehily, the lighthouse seems to quake from the weight of the sea and the turmoil of anger and despair within its walls.
With costume, hair and make-up designs from Valentina Gambardella and Maeve Readman, director Geoff Gould steadies the pace and volatility of the script’s detours within that circling scheme while we witness the dying of the light and the cushion-hunkered audience hauls itself to its feet in time for a standing and deserved ovation.
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That the festival encourages a site-specific quality of genius becomes incontrovertible with its presentation of Gaia, which simply by location offers a series of splendours. Which is not overstating the case as the first surprise on arrival at Cobh is not the town itself, not the harbour on which it sits, not even the cathedral which is the destination, but the white soaring superstructure of the Jewel of the Seas, a Caribbean-line cruiser docked at Cobh’s cruise terminal. At 293 metres long this is the kind of vessel to shake the stones of Venice; here its 15 decks rise layer by layer and so closely tiered above the wharf the impression at a distance is that it must be parked in the streets.
It is not a new addition to the town’s summer skyline, and neither is it the wonder promised by Midsummer. The wonder is up the hill at St Colman’s Cathedral where the festival, with the support of Belvelly Castle and the cathedral itself, has placed Gaia, Luke Gerrard’s marvellous evocation of the planet Earth as seen from Nasa’s spacecraft. Suspended from the cathedral’s vaulted rafters, it rotates on a four-minute cycle, a floating globe of mists and distances, the sphere of our frail world moving through the firmament to a soundscape by Dan Jones.
Belvelly, the festival and the cathedral have placed this marvel with respect: the nave is partly cleared to make a foyer area so visitors entering from doors netted to deter pigeons have space to see space. Also this devout place created by EW Pugin and GC Ashlin in 1868 has its own wonders: as Australia swims briefly over our heads, including those of passengers from Jewel of the Seas, the many shrines and alcoves pulsate with candles, the blue-lit arcades march towards a glowing tabernacle and the great rose window to the west shines in all its brilliance on this day of sunshine and sea air.
Not everything has to be majestic and there is some truth in the saying that wonders will never cease, although I hold my breath when Helen Gregg takes up a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses and asks have we all read this book. As she is questioning a class from Glasheen National School, average age about 12, I suspect she is not surprised at the negative response, although I put up my hand rather tentatively and don’t check on the three schoolteachers.
For this 35-minute presentation by Branar via Anu, Landmark Productions and MoLI we are in the converted boardroom of the Civic Trust House to watch You’ll See, an episode from Ulysses 2,2., in an adaptation by director Marc Mac Lochlainn and Helen Gregg, with endearing design by Maeve Clancy and music by Michael Chang. It is essentially Joyce for Children on this fine day, June 16th. Referencing my inner child this seems a delight, one city, one day, two men captured in pop-up storybook style in a series of volumes used with slow inviting openings of illustrated pages and satisfying slammed closures. Equally satisfying is the dispatch with which Gregg delegates aspects of the novel unsuitable for those of tender years yet manages to keep links like signposts guiding the growing cast of places and characters until at last we reach Molly Bloom and I catch my breath again as the repeated yes is offered but not too often. Yes indeed.
An array of art, music, dance, display, video, theatre and installations makes selection something of a lucky dip — with the unlucky being the cancellation of Anu’s The Wakefires due to illness. A successful engagement and participation series is typified by the Battersea Arts Centre Beatbox partnership with The Everyman and by Nightwalks with Teenagers, based on CMF’s collaboration with Canada’s Mammalian Diving Reflex company. For this a well-organised and ebullient group of youngsters sets off at a clipping pace near nightfall to lead a two-hour odyssey of Cork city as they experience it; so clipping that the threat of eventual up-hill steps permits at least one dropout, an absence replaced by Everyman’s Sophie Motley who with CMF director Lorraine Maye joins the gleeful conga-line.
One bus-ride can’t be a competitor but the Crosstown Drift mystery tour comes close and not only in terms of physical comfort and the visual revelations allowed by the upper deck. This three-stop journey has a coherence which links locations with the writers Sara Baume, John Patrick McHugh, Kevin Barry and Anakana Schofield, but it is Doireann Ní Ghríofa who is most at home when we halt at University College Cork’s new Hub building. The fourth floor here overlooks the gorgeous slopes of Shanakiel and Sunday’s Well but also the roofs of the old anatomy building on the main campus.
A former student, Ní Ghríofa has donated her corpse to UCC and announcing her poem To the Stranger Who Will Dissect My Body, she tells us that if she should now keel over “you’ll know where to find me”. Our next stop is Coughlan’s pub on Douglas Street and then we swing across to the bastions of Docklands where we mount to the board room’s viewing platform at Penrose House. Some privileged sofas have been arranged in the open air for Kevin Barry’s contest with a landscape laid out from the southeastern reaches of the river Lee to the contours of Blarney to west and north, the city netted in between.
That’s how the city looks from up here. Urban Cork is a place the Midsummer Festival makes its own especially as Lorraine Maye is a believer in the injunction to put out more flags and has planned a celebratory parade with the Community Arts Link for the summer solstice. On the streets, however, things look different. Despite the independent best efforts of what might be called the stakeholders, Cork city is out of step with the organisation which is using it as an ever-expanding, ever-potential stage.
Nightwalks exposes the litter on the pavements, thoroughfares as well as alleys drift with detritus, the boarded buildings wait for help with dreary patience, the gable-high murals are rivalled by graffiti. The festival itself, with a misdirected affection or optimism at best, exposes areas of charm or interest which in themselves have attractions although the route to them is grimed.
To leave the dance centre at the Firkin Crane on an evening of long summer sunlight is to see the Butter Market Exchange (not to be confused with the excellent Butter Museum nearby) imprisoned behind bars and a stained banner proclaiming Shandon Historic Centre, the railings lichened with droppings and a tiered stand of petunias and begonias positioned as if in penance. A few metres away is the pristine church of St Anne, its graveyard holding the tomb of Francis Sylvester Mahony, also known as Fr Prout, the friend of Browning and Thackeray and of Shandon steeple, “whose bells he cast to gold”.
This Shandon area, and especially the Shandon bells, are of high tourism value, historically a fortress and since 1769 a market place from which the wealth and glamour of Cork were born. Households and businesses and enterprises here do their bright best to contradict the appearance of a sepulchre which hasn’t been whitened and plans may be on hand for a development of the property. But this is what it looks like now as the Midsummer Festival makes the city its showplace; Cork should be the star of the entire show.
Cork Midsummer Festival continues until Sunday, June 26th
