Since it launched in 1978, Galway international arts festival (GIAF) has changed beyond recognition. “As much goes on in one day now as would have filled that whole programme,” chief executive John Crumlish tells me. But one constant is the commitment to remaining a festival for everybody. This year, 30% of events are free.
The decision, in 2009, to produce as well as host work has enabled GIAF to develop its particular identity and to tour productions in the UK, the US and Australia. Among them is playwright Enda Walsh’s ever-developing series of dramatic installations, Rooms, designed by the festival’s artistic director, Paul Fahy; the first group premiered in 2016. Here, 2020’s Changing Room and the new Dining Room deliver powerfully contrasting stories of hope and desperation.
Reunion is one of several world premieres at this year’s festival. Co-mounted with Landmark Productions, it is written by Mark O’Rowe, whose affecting, Chekhovian chamber piece, The Approach, was a well-deserved hit on the Edinburgh fringe in 2018.
A family gathers in a house on an island off the coast of Ireland, where they used to holiday when the now-adult children were young. The familiar premise (TS Eliot’s The Family Reunion and Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, just two examples) suggests that home truths (or lies) will be told and fault lines in relationships cracked open. They are. Conflicts between siblings, couples, children and parents are detonated by an unexpected visitor.
Moment to moment, O’Rowe’s writing and direction toe-curlingly communicate the painfulness – and the humour – of vicious, expletive-laden arguments. Overall, though, the action feels too contrived; characterisations vivid but narrow; aiming for Chekhovian but arriving at sub-Ayckbournian. The 10-strong ensemble deliver strong performances (special mention to Stephen Brennan) in the realist/symbolist setting of Francis O’Connor’s design, where water runs from the kitchen-sink tap but windows are merely outlined, and a deliberately obvious painted backdrop suggests the view beyond the back door.
O’Connor also designs another of the standout dramas of the festival: Druid Theatre’s new production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, directed by the company’s artistic director, Garry Hynes. Last year’s GIAF launched Hynes’s DruidO’Casey – a magnificent rendering of Seán O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy, with its huge cast and historical sweep. Her direction of Beckett’s single-set play, with just four characters (one confined to a wheeled chair, two others to ashbins), is every bit as assured, meticulous, insightful and emotionally powerful.
Here, O’Connor’s set is stark and suggestive. A grey, circular space evokes, as he proposes in a programme note, a weapons silo, or lighthouse, or the inside of a giant bin; two windows, high up, reveal nothing of the beyond. Rory Nolan’s Hamm is a monarch of desolation in his chair, roaring like storm-scene Lear at Clov, his servant (fool/son/slave?), and at his parents, consigned, with their memories, to their bins to die (Bosco Hogan and Marie Mullen, with just heads and hands peeping from under bin lids, conjure a long-wedded lifetime of banalities, irritations and tenderness).
Aaron Monaghan’s Clov serves their needs, for the moment – dragging himself like a nest-fallen fledgling, too damaged to fly. Towards the end, he mounts his stepladder to report on the “muckheap” world, and spies, dismayed, “a small boy”. Hamm responds: “If he exists, he’ll die there or he’ll come here. And if he doesn’t…”; he lets the sentence drift. Hynes’s attentive, actor-enabling, text-focused direction delivers Beckett’s 1957 drama searingly, as a play for and of today.
Star ratings (out of five)
Reunion ★★★
Endgame ★★★★★
