Cathy set to light up Arts Festival in Matchbox

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy previews the exciting line-up of the Galway Arts festival including homecoming of local actor

She’s one of Ireland’s finest actors, who regularly graces the stage of the Abbey Theatre, has appeared in films such as Philomena and is currently working on TV3’s much praised series Red Rock.

Now Galway City woman Cathy Belton will make her Arts Festival debut this July in Frank McGuinness’s one-woman show The Matchbox, which is being directed by Joan Sheehy. This Festival production marks the Irish premiere of The Matchbox, which was first staged in Liverpool Playhouse in 2012 when critics described it as ‘compelling’ and ‘sharply and simply involving’.

The Matchbox, about a mother’s desire for revenge on the people who have killed her child, will run for the duration of the two-week Festival, explains the event’s director Paul Fahy. Frank McGuinness draws on ancient Greek tragedy for this play, set on Valentia Island and based around events which occurred in Liverpool 12 years previously.

“I couldn’t put the play down,” says Cathy Belton of this story about a smart young woman of Irish extraction who sees her future changed by an early and unplanned pregnancy. She copes well with what life throws at her – until her daughter is gunned down. That tragedy gives rise to her actions as “she moves through bereavement into something else”, explains Cathy.

The Matchbox is being directed by director, writer and actor Joan Sheehy who has worked closely with Frank McGuinness in the past and, says the Arts Festival’s Paul Fahy, “this is the dream team for Frank”.

Far more controversially, from South Africa’s Third World Bunfight comes Exhibit B, which addresses Europe’s colonial past in Africa. Theatre meets installation in Exhibit B at the Black Box as it examines the atrocities which were committed and concealed by European powers in Africa as they colonised the continent in the name of progress. This promenade piece uses the notion of the 19th century freakshow, or human zoo to present 13 different scenes, each with live, motionless, performers who identify themselves as being black. Each performer depicts an example of the suffering that was inflicted on individuals by the European colonisers, continuing right up to the current times and European treatment of immigrants.

Exhibit B, which features a live band from Namibia, has played at festivals all over Europe, winning praise for its unflinching approach to racism and colonialism.

But there have also been protests, amid accusations that this show is racist, and it was forced to close in London’s Barbican Centre last September because of these. However, Brett Bailey of Third World Bunfight, defending the project, said it was made with “love, respect and outrage . . . against the hate of racism”.

Dance will take centre stage at this year’s Festival with the return of the UK based Hofesh Shechter Dance Company. They will present three pieces, Cult, Fragment and Disappearing Act. The final work, Disappearing Act, is completely new while the other two are older pieces which have been reworked, says Paul Fahy. Hofesh Shechter made their Galway Arts Festival debut in 2010 when they presented the powerful show, Political Mother at the Black Box. That’s also the venue this time.

Druid Theatre will host the Irish premiere of Luck Just Kissed you Hello, written by Amy Conroy and presented by Dublin’s HotForTheatre, whose previous work includes I ♥ Alice. This new piece about a transgender character transitioning from male to female is “a funny three-hander”, says Paul Fahy and was presented as an in-development piece at last year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. It will run for the two weeks of the Festival.

Cleggan actor and director Olwen Fouéré, whose one-woman show, Riverrun, has been a hit from London to Adelaide since it premiered at the 2013 Festival, returns with a new show. Lessness was written by Samuel Beckett in 1969, the year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This production will fuse theatre and visual arts, and like Riverrun, it will be co-produced by Galway International Arts Festival and the Emergency Room in conjunction with Cusack Productions. It’s opening in London’s Barbican next month as part of the International Beckett Festival and will then come to Galway where it will be at An Taibhdhearc for two weeks.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.