The Fest in the West

Maturity, confidence, professionalism: the attributes of the current Galway Arts Festival are pronounced by some observers with more than a tinge of regret. At its 21st birthday, the country's biggest arts festival (with a budget of £600,000) has settled into a comfortable relationship with audiences, with the commercial sector of the city, and with visitors. Now spread over two weeks, its pace is relaxed and leisurely, almost sedate, carefully programmed to avoid the agonising choices between events that contributed, in the past, to its frenetic energy.

Reaching this landmark year seems to have prompted a bout of reflection and self-examination all round. In bars and arts centres and in the festival club, participating artists, organisers and committed observers are taking stock, analysing this year's event, which has another six days to go, and remembering the early years. But while many of the insiders are in the grip of nostalgia for the anarchy and spontaneity of the old days, audiences seem very satisfied to live in the present. From its opening, free, open-air performance by the Japanese troupe, the Kodo Drummers, last Monday, which finished with a surprise firework display, the response to the first week of the festival has been warmly enthusiastic.

People queued patiently in the rain for the superb lunchtime recital by the young violinist, Cora Venus Lunny, braved chilly winds and downpours to see the late-night, open-air spectacle, Titanic, and added thousands of umbrellas to the colour on the streets on Sunday as they cheered the community and youth groups who participated in Macnas's Carnival Of Fools parade.

The Gothic-cum-heavy metal Circus Of Horrors staged an extra performance to meet the demand and, even in Saturday night's torrential rain, crowds were turned away in droves from Theater Titanick's show. Every theatre show has been booked out, with the exception of Footsbarn's production of Moliere's Don Juan, possibly because it was performed in French, and there was a second Footsbarn production, The Winter's Tale, programmed for the weekend. The Big Day Out, featuring Pulp, Garbage and The Beastie Boys was under-subscribed, with 10,000 people attending, rather than the 20,000 anticipated. After the cancellation of last year's event, this was "a comeback year" for the concert, says the festival manager, Fergal McGrath. "We have learned a huge amount about running an event of this scale. We didn't make any money on it this year but we can carry it; we're in it for the long haul."

"The festival is as good as it has ever been," says the festival director, Ted Turton. "I wanted this year to be a big party, a celebration of our 21st birthday, to which some old friends would come back, with new work."

He rejects the suggestion that there might be too many old friends and a lack of risk-taking. "I don't think we are becoming complacent, not at all. The programme is a good mix of the familiar and the new. I have tried to get away from the idea of a single, expensive, centrepiece; instead, I have spread the large events out over the two weeks to facilitate access.

"My sense is that this is another transition year and that we are gearing up for an exciting phase, which will build on the fact that the festival's reputation internationally has become extremely high. Over the next two years, as we move towards the Millennium, we want to make it better all round, and to establish a more visible festival presence on the streets."

Galway Arts Festival was originally created to fill a void, in a very different cultural climate in Ireland and part of its success has been the development of an informed and sophisticated audience for the arts, all year round, in Galway. The establishment, two years ago, of two new performance venues, the Town Hall Theatre and The Black Box, means that the city is now very well served by musicians and theatre companies, both local and visiting. According to Paraic Boran, chairman of the festival's board of directors, the festival now has to find shows that wouldn't come to Galway otherwise and "to use public spaces such as car parks" - which suggests a continuation of the emphasis on spectacle which has characterised the festival over the past decade. "Working outside the established venues makes the arts accessible to the greatest possible audience," he says. "This is our aim. We also need to look for shows that are not deemed to be commercial and this will involve a bit more searching.

"The 21st birthday is a watershed psychologically. The board's directors are churning around ideas. We are asking ourselves whether we should just tweak what we have, which is a basically good machine, or even whether we should stop altogether, having achieved all we wanted. What's clear is that we cannot rest on our laurels. It's essential to re-invent yourself to stay ahead."

One possibility being considered for next year is for Galway to participate in the Millennium "Festival of Festivals", a celebratory chain of events building on existing festivals around the country and combining arts and tourism interests. Currently at the discussion stage, the Millennium Festival's organisers include the Gate Theatre's Michael Colgan, among others involved, as well as Doireann Ni Bhriain, who has recently been appointed as co-ordinator. Paraic Boran stresses that his board needs more information about the plans before making any decision, bearing in mind that the tourist industry and the arts don't necessarily speak the same language.

While circus, mime and spectacle have pride of place at the Galway Festival again this year, devotees of text-based theatre have also been catered for by Druid's award-winning production of Martin McDonagh's The Lonesome West, the third play in the Leenane trilogy, featuring Maeliosa Stafford, which is, not surprisingly, playing to packed houses. Bloodstone Theatre, a new Galway company under the direction of Denise McNamara, who uses the Stanislavski system to train actors, is playing Dancing At Lughnasa to full houses also.

But the show that is generating the most excitement is the adaptation by Pat McCabe of his novel, The Dead School, in an Arts Festival/Macnas co-production, directed by Joe O'Byrne and starring Mick Lally. Previewing since Saturday, it opens tonight and its week-long run is already sold out. This £75,000 project is "the biggest risk we have taken this year," Ted Turton says, "but it's what we have wanted to do for a long time: to generate our own, original work."

The Dead School might also give the public perception of Macnas a much-needed boost, as it moves tentatively from its bruising period of perestroika, towards a new, active phase. The company is now seeking a "creative director" and is working on an autumn show, based on the life of Van Gogh, devised by Mikel Murfi of Barabbas and the artist, Patrick O'Reilly, whose kinetic sculpture has gained an appreciative public since his first exhibition at the festival two years ago.

One indication of the rude health of the festival is the emergence this year of a fringe: three days of theatre and music events, held on the UCG campus and culminating in a fringe ball last Friday night. The fringe offers all the edge and intimacy which those who find the ethos of the arts festival becoming too "safe" and "corporate" could desire and it seems fitting that it should spring from UCG Dramsoc, which was the seedbed of the first arts festival in 1978.

Joe Meagher is festival director of the fringe and Paraic Breathnach, former artistic director of the arts festival, and cofounder of Macnas, has thrown his considerable energy behind it. Two memorable shows were Joe Meagher's own production of Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead, which won the award for best production at this year's Irish Student Drama Awards and The Derry Boat, a one-man show performed by actor and writer Little John Nee.

Directed by Paraic Breathnach, this was a funny, clever and poignant celebration of three generations of migration between Donegal and Glasgow, presenting the close ties between the two places in song and reverie, shifting with ease from past to present. Rough and ready scenery made from corrugated iron and some barrels was inventively used to evoke settings from a ship's deck to a mine shaft. .

Galway Youth Theatre's Macbeth, directed by Galway-based playwright, Max Hafler, at Nun's Island Arts Centre, was another encouraging sign of local regeneration. A fluidly choreographed ensemble production, this was beautifully designed, with a genuinely unsettling atmosphere created by long shadows, bloodcurdling screams, eerie sounds and candlelit scuffles. The young actors, aged 18 to 25, spoke the verse with confidence and intelligence.

Speeches from Macbeth cropped up again in the specially created video, Neither Seen Nor Heard, filmed by the French artist, Marylene Negro, over a single day on the roof of a Galway car park. An imaginative addition to the festival's eclectic and adventurous visual arts programme, the film was lit from behind and dominated by the magnificent, ever-changing western sky. Offering local people an opportunity to present themselves in front of a camera, it was a fascinating, often moving study of how people choose to project and express themselves when confronted with the theoretical "empty space" of theatre or camera frame. The result was a succession of fantasies, role-playing, self-dramatisation, songs, poetry and rhetorical speeches, with many people speaking in Irish, and bursts of laughter punctuating each presentation.

The public's eagerness to participate in the project was a reminder of the excitement generated by the arts festival in the hinterland of Galway, from where 70 per cent of its audiences are drawn. As Fergal McGrath points out, "Galway people are oblivious to reviews. They know what they like." And, judging by the success of the first week, it looks as if the festival knows too.

The Galway Arts Festival runs until Sunday. For information phone local 1890 575655.