Nowhere and anywhere

ANY YEAR IN which Druid Theatre Company premieres a new work during the Galway Arts Festival represents a rewarding nexus of events, writes Peter Crawley

Just as the festival, now in its 31st year, remains local in character and ethos but international in impact and reach, so Druid represents a world-class company rooted in the cultural fabric of Galway.

Druid's production, however, is a challenging work in more ways than one. The New Electric Ballroom, a surreal fable of three sisters shut away from society and immersed in endlessly repeated stories that provide as much suffocation as succour, has no fixed location. It is set in an unspecified remote fishing town, which Walsh, directing his own production, seems to place in Donegal, while the show's apocalyptic-kitsch design and clutter of timeless props are carefully evasive. Add the fact that the play was originally written in Munich by a Dublin-born writer, who made his name in Cork, and now lives in London, and any clear point of origin begins to blur.

Amid all the indoor antics of dressing-up and propping up old memories until they warp into parody Mikel Murfi announces, "Things are odd. Outside." To which the only response can be, outside where?

Glancing at the theatre programme this year, you could be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled into an unofficial Enda Walsh festival. Always alive to the galvanising power of theatre as an "event", Druid will next week perform two of the writer's one-act plays - Lynndie's Gotta Gun and Gentrification- which, with the upcoming Druid Debut season, again focuses the company's attention on new writing.

Meanwhile, the dependably adventurous Galway Youth Theatre have also turned their attentions to matters Walsh, presenting his darkly riveting Chatroom as one of their three productions at the festival. Here too, place is dislocated. "It's been nice talking to you," one teenager tells another as she prepares to log out of an internet chat room. "Whoever you are."

Although Andrew Flynn's production scrupulously relocates any specific references (a local fast food joint makes a guest appearance for instance), Walsh's play, well-served by a committed young cast, guides us with grim humour through the downward spiral of boredom and bullying, where nihilism becomes easier under the mask of anonymity. "In these rooms, words are power," says one character, which could be a good description of Enda Walsh's work as a whole. Claustrophobic, gripping and devastating, they are dispatches from a placeless world.

Another GYT show, a production of Neil LaBute's steadily unsettling Somegirl(s), couldn't be more confining, leading its audience into a hotel room to witness a series of meetings between a guy called Guy (Cathal Finnerty) and a succession of his ex-girlfriends. Guy, a writer, refers to himself as either "a shit or a fearless cartographer of the human soul", but despite Finnerty's easy charm, LaBute offers us only evidence of the former.

At two-and-a-half hours, Niall Cleary's site-specific staging is a brave gambit, but the proximity of the performers and the audience brings a little more intensity than the production can bear. On the other hand, how specific is this site? When the same hotel room can plausibly serve as LA, Chicago or Seattle, or a cast of young Galway actors display unerring command of LaBute's photorealism and American accents, we could be anywhere . . .

THAT'S CERTAINLY the effect of watching Alabama 3in a jam-packed room in Róisín Dubh, a London group that are neither a trio nor hail from Alabama. Even the songs need clarification. "This is not a song about New Jersey mobsters," croaks Larry Love (aka Rob Spragg) before Woke Up This Morning, forever to be known as the theme tune to The Sopranos. "This is a song about victims of domestic violence." He must make this distinction a lot.

Performed with the same acoustic jangle of the night's succession of infectious, bluesy swamp songs ("I was paid by the Galway Arts Festival to provide a mood of melancholia," Love explains), the effect needs no explanation. Nor is it strictly necessary to embed Irish place names in a cover of Fulsom Prison Blues, which tonight becomes Mountjoy Prison Blues. As any Londoner beneath a cowboy hat, sunglasses and affected drawl knows, a place is just a state of mind.

The children's theatre group Cups and Crowns recognise the happy potential for geographical slippage too (as one five year old remarked) with Captain McKeone's Secret Walking Tour of Galway, imagining a local jaunt as an uncharted terrain of scavenging and sea monsters. "I asked for sailors, not children," breathed the Captain at one point, "but that's what they gave me." He sighed theatrically. "We're in a recession."

Festival regulars Catastrophe Theatre company marked the economic transition in their own way. Josh Tobiessen's site-specific play, performed in the Tara Restaurant, found its most resonant note in its establishing seconds; when a man in a tuxedo could pass for either a high-flying millionaire or a lowly waiter. Subservience in society and love is the theme of Paul Hayes's production, which, anxious to amuse, soon trades class satire for broad farce. It's not quite what we ordered, but Caroline Power, alone in finding a comic tone that balances Tobiessen's wittier lines with the escalating farrago, provides fine service.

Samuel Becketts Waiting For Godot is famously without a specific location - A country road. A tree. - which allows it to transcend locality and stake a place between nowhere and anywhere. Eileen Gibbonss gentle comedy Waiting For Elvis makes soft allusions to Becketts tramps as Lisa Marie (Gibbons) and Elizabeth (Helen Gregg) await the coming of their saviour, Elvis Presley, but the piece is really an amusing study of friendship on the margins of society. Gibbons and Gregg wisely keep their gormless characters within the orbit of our sympathy when they could easily tip into throwaway caricatures, while Gregg's plasticine facial expressions and Gibbons's charmingly detailed writing show the bonds of companionship will persist, even if they are waiting for the King to come until kingdom come.

While Molora, a mixed affair of striking stagecraft and ill-fitting allusions, transferred ancient Greek tragedy to a contemporary South African context, there were some who found the Blue Nile's concert no less transporting. "The hits just keep coming," said Paul Buchanan, a softly sardonic joke for a band who have released just four albums in over two decades. It's a strange alternative to legendary composer Philip Glass, but the response to his suite of delicate, drifting music was disproportionately raucous. Me, I find them almost offensively inoffensive, a murmured milky mildness that will supply no musical traction. But there's no denying that those who have invested in such ballads and plaints are borne aloft and carried somewhere else.

That, so far, is a common springboard for the performance programme at this year's Galway Arts Festival, one that recognises a culture without boundaries, an art that is here, there and everywhere.

[ www.galwayartsfestival.com ]