A breathtaking spin around Galway

There’s plenty to get excited about at the Galway Arts Festival this year, as theatre triumphs and audience participation is taken to new levels around the city

THE SURPRISE THAT emerged early on from this year's Galway Arts Festival was that theatre was selling out. Usually music gigs sell out first. But this year, tickets for such shows as Misterman, The Comedy of Errors, Request Programmeand Controlled Falling Project, which features acrobatics, galloped away from the box office faster than any winner of the Galway Plate.

Conduct a vox pop anywhere on the streets of Galway this week and you will find the one festival ticket everyone wants is for Misterman, Enda Walsh's new version of his one-man play.

One family who had tickets were Christine Connolly and John Ford, and their children Alannah (15) and Conghal (11). "Every year we pick out one show to take our children to, so that they can have a great experience, and this year we heard the word was on Misterman," explained Connolly. "When you hear an elderly lady who's been to a preview raving about it at the supermarket checkout next to you, as I did, you know something good is happening."

Audience collaboration came in many forms in the first few days of the festival. On Tuesday, before visual artist Hughie O’Donoghue’s talk, the cameras were turned on the assembled audience at the gallery for the exhibition entitled The Road.

The Road was having its premiere in Galway, and a catalogue of the show is being created. The audience was asked to walk around the space, with O’Donoghue standing in self-conscious mortification on a plinth in the middle, while a photographer took the shots. “You’ll all be in the catalogue,” we were told.

Also in the festival gallery, audiences were asked to enter a giant inflatable video booth in the shape of a question mark and record a two-minute answer to the question: “What is truth?” The public seemed to be intrigued by Truth Booth, which was created by American artists Cause Collective. “I really appreciate the intimacy of it,” said Chris McCormack from Kildare. “It’s like you have to look into a mirror of your own thoughts, because you have to think about what truth is to you.” The message he left was: “The truth is an obsession.”

“I think it could be art, but it doesn’t fit my definition of art,” said Alyssa Gerstner from Washington DC. “I rambled. What is the truth? I’m looking for it too is the core of what I said.”

At Paul Maye’s Fictional Portraits, which features composite portraits that use images of up to nine people to make one new image, the original subject of one was looking at what was left of her face once it had been digitally merged with six others.

It was the first time Juliette de la Mer had seen the portrait of what had once been her face. “I only recognise my scarf,” she said.

“I left the tip of your nose,” Maye explained.

“Are those my ears?”

“No, but they are your earrings.”

“I don’t get it, but I think there’s some philosophical thing behind it,” said de la Mer.

Her fictional portrait was entitled Possible MS Target DemographicII. "That's because the completed image looks to me like a woman who likes food, but not chopping vegetables," explained Maye. "Some people say they find the pictures creepy, but that's as valid a response as any. "I know the portraits are complete when they no longer look like the person who originally sat."

During Request Programme, a silent site-specific show in which the audience is supposed to walk around an apartment after actor Eileen Walsh, some audience members chose not to follow her everywhere.

Some scenes take place in bathrooms, where Walsh’s character urinates. Most of the audience looked at the floor and anywhere but into the bathroom.

Others remained on the sofa in the living room reading about Prince Albert's wedding in a copy of Hello!magazine that had been placed on a table there and didn't go anywhere else for the entire show.

The festival continues until July 24th See galwayartsfestival.com

Ask the artists

MISTERMAN

Thomas Conway in coversation with Enda Walsh and Cillian Murphy on Wednesday

When about 390 people of an audience of 400 remain behind after a show to hear the post-show discussion, it's clear there is something special in the house. That show at the Black Box was Enda Walsh's new version of his play Misterman, which had its premiere this week in Galway with Cillian Murphy playing Thomas Magill, the Misterman of the title.

Thomas Conway, the Druid’s literary manager, facilitated the discussion with Walsh and Murphy. Conway’s own question was one he admitted always wanting to ask Walsh: “How do you define your own plays?”

“I think they are about characters in impossible situations,” Walsh responded. “It’s always about a man or a woman rolling a f**king enormous rock up a hill. All my plays are about anxiety. They’re fuelled by anxiety. My characters are about trying to survive.”

He then told how an audience member had approached him on a previous night after the show. “It nearly broke my heart the other night when someone in the audience came up and said to me, ‘I never gave up on Thomas Magill’,” said Walsh, as he pounded his chest.

Walsh pointed out that the biggest moments in his plays, such as Misterman, have always already happened before they open.

Conway told the audience that early in his career, Walsh liked to hitchhike to places in Ireland whose names caught his imagination, or interest. “Place like Cloughjordan, Termonfeckin,” said Walsh. “It gave me a sense of small towns, what they were like. Chatting to everyone. Little old ladies.”

All of those places have since become an amalgam of the setting that is Inisfree.

Murphy does several different regional Irish accents during the show. “We decided to populate Inisfreee with voices from all over Ireland,” Murphy explained. “That way, we could have much broader personalities.”

How had Murphy coped with the demands of the role of Thomas Magill, an audience member asked. “It’s never easy, and it shouldn’t be,” he admitted frankly. “I love immersive work, and a one-man show gives you that challenge.”

HUGHIE O’DONOGHUE

Talking about his exhibition, The Road, at the Absolut Festival Gallery on Tuesday

About 150 people gathered to hear O'Donoghue talk about the work on show at the festival's impressive temporary gallery space, an old warehouse in the Galway Shopping Centre, right. The title piece, The Road, a work of 48 panels, was made specially for the festival. "This is a work in progress," he explained. "There will be 120 panels when completed."

There were two starting points for this work: his father’s experience in the second World War, and a book he found about the grasses of Britain and Ireland, Gramina Britannia. “Remembering is a creative act,” said O’Donoghue.

He wants the finished piece to be like an epic poem. Each panel resembles pages from a book, and each one incorporates a page from Gramina Britannia in it in some way. He explained that he had also used family photographs, maps and images of the places his father went to during his life and time in the war.

The cumulative effect he wanted to create was that of “the photographic membrane”.

As he stood beside the first panel, he explained that the photograph was of his grandfather’s suitcase, which he took with him when he emigrated to England from Kerry. “This is about origins,” he said. “I decided to make the work chronological.”

Each panel in The Roadrefers to a specific and significant period of time in his father's life.

“An artist has to know their subject matter intimately,” he said, and that the motif of his life’s subject matter was essentially his family and its history.He wanted to explore the intersection of his father’s life with the second World War.

“At the moment that things are falling out of memory – such as [with the loss of] survivors from World War 2, of whom there are not many left – they become interesting.”