PUNK POETRY and “terrifying theatre tapas” are promised as part of this year’s Galway Theatre Festival which opened in the city yesterday.
Emerging theatre artists from Galway and Cork also aim to brainstorm over the nature of small-scale drama in Ireland in a pilot project run with Cork’s Solstice group.
“The idea behind this initiative, known as Parley, is to enable artists working outside Dublin to connect with one another on a practical level,” Galway Theatre Festival’s director Roisín Stack has explained.
Work from Dublin’s recent Absolut Fringe and from Cork Midsummer’s Solstice Season has been booked for the week-long programme. The festival was initiated by Druid Theatre Company’s artistic director Garry Hynes in Nun’s Island Theatre yesterday.
Jaki McCarrick's Belfast Girlsis the pick of this year's "Stage Write" rehearsed reading panel.
It is McCarrick's second time to be selected, as her work Leopoldvillewas given a rehearsed reading in 2009 and continued to become a full-blown British production.
Punk poet Jinx Lennon and Septic Tiger Records will present an audio-visual performance inspired by the “self-indulgence gene”, a “deadly pestilence which manifests itself through Hibernia”.
Using words, electro-beats, film, knives, screwdivers, a six-string guitar and a bullhorn “noisemaker”, Lennon hopes to expose his “cracked mirror view” of the state in which the Republic finds itself.
There’s a link-up with the Galway Comedy Festival, which is also running this week.
The two events are co-hosting Vagabond Theatre's production of Conor Montague's Who Needs Enemies, about a man who has lost his "mojo" following a "traumatic experience in Amsterdam".
A free-of-charge public discussion on common trends in Irish theatre will take place on Saturday in the Galway Arts Centre.
The Galway Theatre Festival is supported by the Arts Council and Galway City Council and runs until Sunday.
More details are on galwaytheatrefestival.com