Thanks to Ed Sheeran’s song Galway Girl, this year’s European capital of culture has widespread name recognition. And for the first time, Brussels has selected both a city and its surrounding county. The hope is that Galway will fare better than UK city of culture Derry over the Irish border, did in 2013. Visitor numbers there were disappointing, with little subsequent “cultural legacy”.
Galway 2020 kicks off today, International Women’s Day, with Margaret Atwood and Jan Carson among the writers and artists talking under the banner of “Wild Atlantic Women”. Having just been to Galway, I can vouch that the coast is very wild, and from Saturday, Savage Beauty, an ambitious light display over a huge area of the Connemara mountains, will run until St Patrick’s Day.
Galway 2020 had a stormy start. Creative director Helen Marriage, co-founder of the London-based arts events company Artichoke (The Sultan’s Elephant; Antony Gormley’s fourth plinth), took over a year ago, after Galway’s first creative director departed. However, there remain problems with sponsorship, while the city council has refused more cash. Marriage has sharpened the 2020 programme with themes of “language, landscape and migration”. Galway city may have a population of just 80,000 (there are more sheep in County Galway than humans), but it’s the most diverse conurbation in Ireland. “We will be asking what it means to be Galwegian, Irish and European,” says Marriage. “With no plans for a new gallery or theatre, this festival is about what individual artists and the people themselves can do.”
The full programme can be found on the Galway 2020 website, but highlights include the Druid Theatre’s tour around the county’s villages of rarely performed one-act plays by Sean O’Casey, WB Yeats and others; Paper Boat, a community opera exploring exile and sanctuary; Laurie Anderson’s immersive To the Moon; and a reading of The Odyssey on a beach that, allegedly, Odysseus visited. Really?
Back in England, two art shows have grabbed my attention. At London’s Royal Academy until May is Léon Spilliaert, about whom our art critic, Laura Cumming, wrote in depth last month. I had never heard of this Belgian, but his hypnotically moody work lingers in the mind. Curious, too, how his 1926 painting The Shipwrecked Man is so similar to Peter Doig’s later boat series. And at the British Museum is French Impressions, a show of its wonderful French prints, hardly ever seen. The stars are Manet’s Le ballon (1862) and a Van Gogh of his doctor, Paul Gachet, donated a century ago by the medic’s son and never before displayed in the museum.
The Oscar-winning Parasite, now the most successful foreign language film in the UK ever, has led to the South Korean government offering money for home improvements in semi-basements, like the one occupied by the Kims in the movie . If only Ken Loach’s recent films on benefits and the gig economy had such an effect here.
