As the Kilkenny Arts Festival draws to a close, GEMMA TIPTONplans a culture-packed weekend
THERE WAS a mid-week lull in Kilkenny. It was a valuable, quieter time for both festival stalwarts and revellers of a different hue to gather strength for this weekend’s finale. Like a sweet shop or an off-licence, a good arts festival offers a beguiling array of temptations, and yet you wonder whether you should limit your choice somehow, so that one thing doesn’t wipe out the memory of another.
During the week, an unofficial festival club established itself in the atmospheric Tynan’s bar, where you could escape loud music and instead talk of culture under low Victorian ceilings and by candlelight. The official hub and clubs have been Paris Texas on High Street and the recently opened Set Theatre. News filtered through from Edinburgh that the festival director there, Jonathan Mills, had taken the theatrical good-luck phrase “break a leg” literally. He tripped on a paving stone and fractured his ankle.
Colm Tóibín has been here all week, as has Matthew Nolan. They put the festival's literature and Wired (indie music) programmes together respectively and each has a gig this weekend. Tomorrow at 3pm, Tóibín will read from his recent, Booker-nominated novel, Brooklyn, together with Peter Murphy, reading from his first, John the Revelator.
On Sunday, Nolan is playing with 3epkano (with Halfset and Nick Carswell). 3epkano re-score old silent movies bringing a new urgent passion, and sometimes strangeness, to classics such as Nosferatu, Metropolisand The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, although on Sunday they will be playing to a backdrop of short films by Donal Dineen. The venue for each of these gigs is almost a good enough reason in itself to go. The Set Theatre, where the paint barely had time to dry before it was inaugurated at the festival, is another David Collins-designed extravaganza in the Langton's empire. It's a fantastic spot – although if you're planning to see Garrison Keillor there tonight, they may be moving him up to St Canice's Cathedral as he sold out almost as soon as the programme was launched.
Another sell-out has been Krapp's Last Tape, which played last weekend, took the mid-week off, and is on again tomorrow and Sunday. That's an awful lot of bananas. "I actually only eat one per performance, the other one I peel, if you remember, goes in my pocket," says Fergus Cronin, who adds that it takes a while to shrug off the character of Krapp.
The festival has expanded enormously since it began 35 years ago. Then, its main focus was music, and it's in classical music that you can have some truly sublime experiences. Again, while programming obviously has a great deal to do with it, the venues play their part. The acoustics in St Canice's Cathedral are amazing, particularly near the back, where the music rolls around the aisles and bounces off the stone arches to fill the space with resonant notes. In the evening, as the sun sets, the stained-glass windows glow. Tonight's Monteverdi Vespersby the Ex Cathedra Consort, and the marvellously-named His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts, should be fantastic. Tomorrow's programme of music from films and musicals played by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at St Canice's will be more of a crowd-pleaser, but nonetheless fun.
You come for one thing, and you leave having seen a Beckett play, maybe Peter Brooke's selection from Shakespeare's sonnets ( Love is my Sin, today and Saturday at 8pm), marvelled at what Katie Kim can do with a guitar, and listened to what Fintan O'Toole has to say to Thomas Kilroy (Sunday at 12.30pm).
Interesting people abound, you see the unexpected and go away enriched. Not everything lives up to expectations, but some things surpass them entirely. A festival like this takes a huge amount of time and effort to put together, but wouldn’t it be great if life was like this all the time?
Festival runs until August 16th, www.kilkennyarts.ie
