Galway International Arts Festival reviews: Theatre highlights and circus spectacle
Carnation, the latest show from No Fit State Circus at Galway International Arts Festival.
“An mbeidh tu ag dul?” ask the posters seen all over Galway, for the city’s International Arts Festival. And, indeed, of all the festivals in Ireland, this is the one it makes the most sense to go to, from near or far.
That’s because when you get there, it completely enfolds you. It’s impossible to avoid. You might stop at a wooden box with the word “Sin” glowing in red, and sit inside. You would emerge a few minutes later, having shared a deeply intimate and moving encounter with a complete stranger: a sort of secular confessional.
That’s the beguiling (★★★★). Moving around town, you could turn a corner and see a group of people running down the street in a silent disco, belting out the tunes as if no one was watching. Or a reenactment of , reimagined on giant -inspired machines.
Then there’s the big top sitting on Nimmo’s Pier, where No Fit State Circus are in residence. Their latest show, (★★★★), combines their anarchic spirit, and revolutionary politics with gasp-inducing acrobatic displays, high-flying trapeze, feats of agility and strength, and lively musical accompaniment.
While the political sloganeering can be somewhat stale and heavy-handed, the show amounts to a compelling statement of what should not be very radical ideas, about collaboration, community, and trust winning out against selfishness and individualism. It runs until the July 26 and is a treat for all ages.
In another festival headline show, (★★★★★), the atomised nature of modern life is also something of a starting point. Also seen in Cork last year, the spirited show from the Melbourne-based collective Pony Cam, takes that overused metaphor of the treadmill (all effort, going nowhere) and makes it literal.
Four of the workout devices are placed on stage, one for each of the performers: Hugo Williams, William Strom, Claire Bird and Dominic Weintraub. Ava Campbell is the timekeeper (when she’s not racing around the room giving Berocca to anyone who shouts for it). She sets the performers off in four 12-minute rounds, during which they have to complete tasks under four life categories: survival, admin, performance, and leisure.
For survival, that’s cooking a three-course meal, while running on a treadmill. For admin, a grand application has to be completed (while running on treadmill); for performance we get everything from contemporary dance to a soliloquy on a loop (while, well, you get the picture).
Leisure is, of course, where all those tasks big and small are hopelessly to-do listed, requiring a double-sided whiteboard, and endless help from audience members, whether that’s to apply lipstick, chug a beer, pour wine, shoot hoops, or whatever.
The end result is hectic, chaotic, impossible to follow perfectly, and contagiously hilarious.
What starts, then, as an indictment of the contemporary pressure to optimise every second of existence, to the exclusion of rest, and, again, community, actually succeeds in conjuring an overwhelming sense of the latter. The question of will “they” complete their tasks, and set a new record for distance, soon becomes, implicitly, “Will we?”
Two people are plucked from the audience to be served that three-course meal. “I can really taste the hands,” one finally says of the freshly made pasta. Palpable effort, in other words. You had to admire it.
You also had to admire the conviction of Catriona Faint and Lara McDonnell who, respectively, play spiky Glaswegian Mo and middle-class young Irish woman Realtin with immense integrity in (★★★), Eva O’Connor’s intense two-hander for Fishamble. Theirs is an unorthodox family. They are together, but not together, and with Réaltín’s young daughter, Dolores, who, we soon find out, has an aunt in Mo. Theirs is a story of intense attraction and repulsion: a friendship that once teetered on a love affair but is now reforming after tragedy.
is a compelling mixture of soap opera and witty domestic drama, leavened with moments of sharp comedy and emotional truth that bring us into a private, shared world. After its Galway stint, is at the Pavilion, in Dún Laoghaire, until July 26, and in Edinburgh this August.
