Galway Arts Fest reviews: Cork choreographer shines with ambitious dance piece

Irish Examiner

18-07-2025

Scorched Earth, Black Box, ★★★★☆
Cork choreographer and theatre-maker Luke Murphy is back at the Galway International Arts Festival a few years after his stunning breakthrough work, Volcano. Scorched Earth, developed at the Firkin Crane centre, is another piece of ambitious dance theatre, centered on a national obsession: land.
It's not exactly news that this runs deep in the Irish psyche, but there is a freshness in Murphy's conception, as he gives an update on John B Keane's The Field for our age of cold-case podcasts and crime drama procedurals. And while Celtic Tiger references abound, the central theme remains relevant as ever amid our ongoing housing crisis. Will we ever learn?
Murphy plays the prime suspect in the cold case, interviewed in a bleak, grey room about the suspicious death of the English developer who outbid him for the field he was leasing. The field he cherished, the field he made live. The field that was, like the Bull McCabe's, his and his only, by right.
The 24 hours of detention count down on a digital clock as the story unfolds, with projected newspaper clippings, and slideshows of old case files making clear this particular crime is a symptom of a broader malaise.
If the dramatic scenes could use some tightening up, we rarely lack for striking images, especially as dance is blended in. A country-and-Irish line dancing scene takes on a strange beauty. While a scene that has Murphy's character start with tufts of grass in his hands, morphs into a darkly surreal seduction dance. His partner is the field incarnate, head to toe in a grassy bodysuit, threatening to smother him.
A pure-dance epilogue is perhaps the highlight. It comes after Alyson Cummins's set is literally torn down by the players, only for a grassy hill to rise up before us. What follows is choreography of a vigorous and literally earthy kind that's reminiscent of Michael Keegan-Dolan's work: bodies rising and tumbling, pulling and dragging. But Murphy's vision is singular, and realised expertly in the show's rich, multifaceted design. (Until July 19. Touring in 2026.)
Story of a Day/Sceal Lae, The Cube, University of Galway, ★★★★☆
Story of a Day.
Branar theatre company have produced a little gem for younger audiences at this year's Galway festival, in the shape of Story of a Day /Sceal Lae, a charming and musical journey following a child from dawn to dusk. It's a 'nothing-special-happens kind of day,' Eoin O Dubhghaill, who plays the child, tells us. But there is nothing ordinary here, as Tom Lane's gorgeous score, played by the ConTempo Quartet and Daniel Browell on piano, combines with Mary Murphy's words of wonder (in Irish or English, depending on the performance) and beautiful images to convey a youthful fascination with the world.
It's directed with great charm by Marc MacLochlainn and deserves to be seen widely. (Until July 20.)
The Baby's Room, Bailey Allen Hall, University of Galway, ★★★☆☆
The Baby's Room. Picture: Emilija Jefremova
Enda Walsh and festival artistic director Paul Fahy have created something of an institution over more than a decade with their 'Rooms' series of immersive theatre shows. For this year's installment, the effect is striking and disorienting in equal measure, as the door into a white cube in a gallery space opens to reveal a hyper-realistic hallway taking us into a cluttered baby's room. The interior is redolent of a certain late-20th-century Irish domesticity, not much style, but plenty of kitsch.
We are invited to poke about, opening drawers to reveal babygrows and so on, before the short story is told via Kate Gilmore's disembodied voice. Anyone who saw Walsh's Safe House, which also featured Gilmore, will be familiar with the material: a young woman's drab and unfulfilled life. Except this time, there's an unexpected twist that has one thinking of Being John Malkovich. (Until July 27.)