From Latin hymns to bubble gum

Audiences get free run of a Cork theatre this week. This inclusivity is the hallmark of the Midsummer Festival, writes Mary Leland

From the Tallis Scholars to the Spiegeltent, from Picnic in the Park to Danger Museum, this Cork Midsummer Festival had something for everyone in the audience, even if now and again it wasn't something they particularly wanted. But this is a risk with programme-making of such scope, and it was surprising during the past 10 days at how many of the same people turned up to almost everything.

Appetite may be the key. The fusion of the festival atmosphere with the occasionally linked events of Cork's year as European Capital of Culture bred an awareness of possibilities. Thus, after the stunning success of Corcadorca's promenade production of The Merchant of Venice, there was quite a crowd outside the back door of the Everyman Palace for the first night of Dark Week, presented by Playgroup and the Everyman Palace Studio for the festival.

Docile and expectant, the audience is allowed a free run of the labyrinthine theatre in which tableaux of seamstresses, props, lighting rigs and preparations for a rehearsal are worked, somewhat loosely, into an evocation of its former life as a Palace of Varieties.

Very gradually a show is mounted and equally gradually fades to a phantom existence as the auditorium is sheeted in plastic and the silent cinema takes over the stage.

There is a curious, and somewhat confusing, mingling of cast and audience, but artistic directors Tom Creed and Hilary O'Shaughnessy don't care too much about that; this is a show devised according to a particular agenda and it's up to the groundlings to accede to that quirky premise, made more whimsical by the overtones of a jazz singer (Annette Buckley) in the foyer bar and the groans of the lost meandering property bear.

It may not be theatre as we know it, but Dark Week (closing Saturday) is fun, and so is the La Gayola Spiegeltent on Kyrl's Quay, where the public have been enjoying Camille O'Sullivan, Paddy Keenan and Tommy O'Sullivan, Manu and his Latino House, John Spillane and Louis De Paor and others in a generous line-up.

This may seem a far cry from St Fin Barre's Cathedral where the Tallis Scholars found a capacity audience last Saturday, but the festival's atmosphere of inclusivity is so relaxed that boundaries melt into unexpected sharings.

At the cathedral the Scholars (followed this Saturday by the Galway Baroque Singers) demonstrated their supremacy in the a cappella convention, singing not only from the chancel space but also from the further reaches of the building, joining their complex Latin harmonies from sanctuary to organ loft.

Such satisfactions were not rare for this festival fortnight. There was the tender domestic symmetry of Homemade from the Signal to Noise company, as well as the more dramatic hotel-based Chamber Made from CoisCéim Dance Theatre. CruX Dance Theatre presented The Beach Project for one day only at Graball Bay in Crosshaven, and Hammergrin continues with Trying Jokes at the former temporary courthouse building on Camden Quay in the city. The bigger theatrical excitements, of course, came from the Corcadorca Relocations production of The Merchant of Venice, which continues to Saturday, and from the premiere of Enda Walsh's new play, Pondlife Angels, at the Granary also until the 25th.

Rather in the manner of Dark Week, some events were more or less what you made of them. While the Everyman foyer is enhanced by the 44 Frames exhibition by photographer Janice O'Connell, across the city Responses was a community-based art project presented in association with Cork 2005 and examining residents' relationships with the South Parish. Three artists offered a bubble-gum blowing extravaganza as part of a photographic exchange, a ceramic-smashing extravaganza as part of an installation of emotional significance, and a collection of 100 paper boxes containing fragmentary texts which visitors can remove as they wish.

This all makes some kind of creative sense, which is more than can be said for Danger Museum's presentation of Blow-In, a visual and textual commentary on Cork as observed by transient newcomers. The company didn't quite bring it off. The planned introductory parachute-jump onto the cricket pitch next to the city museum had to be cancelled due to timing problems with aviation regulations, and it was left to distinctly displeased County Cork Cricket Club officials to advise those who had turned up of the cancellation.

In the museum itself, the Blow-In installation consisted of two photographic collages - and not very big ones at that - and an artfully-constructed pile of booklets on the floor. The hard-working deputy Lord Mayor, Cllr Mary Shields, had to preside over this somewhat daunting display; wisely she spoke cordially but briefly and left it up to the rest of us to enjoy what we could of the event.

But in fact there's more to Blow-In than met the eye. The booklet is a series of interviews with local people such as John Adams of UCC's Campus Radio and of the Cork Art Trail who would like to see a campaign to "get rid of the City Manager" and who admits that nothing has made him angrier in a long time than Cork 2005.

This interaction between the festival and Cork 2005 is worth examining. While Adams expresses himself forcefully and even bitterly, and has resigned himself to having nothing to do with Cork 2005, and while some of his statistics as well as his attitudes might have been questioned, given free rein here he at least does the city's arts community the service of letting off the shared steam and voicing some of the shared doubts and disputes.

Also interviewed for the booklet is the more temperate Ali Robertson, Artistic Director of the Midsummer Festival, who believes it is undeniable that Cork 2005 hasn't "captured the city".

Formerly the director of the Granary Theatre in Cork, Robertson is in his third year with the Midsummer Festival, for which he organised a very strong children's programme as well as the hugely popular Picnic in the Park (in association with the city's Parks Department). Yet he accepts that he is, and may always be, a "blow-in". This gives a valuable perspective, he says in Danger Museum's magazine: Cork 2005 has defined culture broadly, but not very well. "I think the point they tried to make is that there shouldn't be any leaders and that everyone's point is valid. That's all very nice. But art isn't democracy."

The Midsummer Festival ends Saturday