Europe's summer arts festivals have already started

To many tourists, Almada is best known for its huge statue of Jesus Christ (the Cristo Rei), which stands, its back to the city, looking across the Tagus to Lisbon. However, those of a more cultural bent know that the municipality can also claim – in Festival de Almada – the biggest and best theatre festival in Portugal.

I am fortunate to be an old friend of this extraordinary showcase of live drama from throughout Portugal and the world. I’ve been attending editions of the festival since the days when its founder, the great theatre ­director Joaquim Benite (who died in 2012), was still around.

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I’m glad to say that, under Benite’s ­successor (and former deputy) Rodrigo Francisco, the ­Almada showcase has maintained all of the key characteristics that make it one of the most ­impressive (and most welcoming) festivals in ­Europe.

For instance, at what other ­festival can one find oneself standing in line to be served at the communal, al fresco restaurant (which is located in the car park of a secondary school) only to see the great Serbian-Hungarian ­choreographer Josef Nadj walk by, followed soon after by the legendary German theatre ­director Peter Stein?

Under Francisco’s leadership, Festival de ­Almada has maintained the sense of ­egalitarianism, a kind of municipal socialism, that was part of Benite’s original plan. Here, ­everyone – from audience members to actors, great playwrights and humble critics – eats ­together (while, each evening, they are treated to a live set by a ­different group of musical ­artists).

In maintaining his festival’s welcome, ­Francisco has also maintained its standing in the world. That’s why he is able to continue to attract work of the calibre of (my favourite show during my nine days in Almada) Nadj’s Full Moon. Dance should, the choreographer’s official website avers, be considered “above all” as “a site for encounter”.

Performed on the large stage of the outdoor auditorium at D António da Costa Secondary School, this extraordinary piece – in which the 67-year-old Nadj appears, masked, ­alongside 10 Black African dancers – is one of the most compelling, moving, humorous and deeply ­intelligent dance works it has been my ­privilege to see. We know that our human ­species ­began (approximately 200,000 years ago) in East ­Africa (yes, that means you are of African ­descent, Nigel Farage).

Nadj’s piece – by way of its superb ­African performers – explores notions of an ­essential ­African dance. However, inevitably, it ­encounters the arrested development in ­African culture created by European colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent ­post-colonialism.

All of this and more is encountered by the piece with a lightness of touch, a depth of thought and a satirical comedy. ­Primarily, ­however, this inventive piece encounters ­culture, history and politics by means of ­exceptional, ­wonderfully varied and often breathtakingly virtuosic ­movement.

Full Moon is a genuinely complete ­choreography, a dance work that enriches the mind and the soul.

Another highlight in Almada was A Nervous Breakdown – three one-act plays by Anton Chekhov. Directed in Italian by Stein for Tieffe ­Teatro of Milan, these knowingly comic short plays were presented in the splendid Teatro Municipal Joaquim Benite in the heart of Almada.

Death, loss, love, passion and greed are, in the hands of Stein and his fine Italian cast, treated as impostors all the same. It is an approach to Chekhov that, in its subtlety and humour, could teach British directors of works by the Russian master a thing or two.

This year’s Almada programme also included the return of the famous American theatre-maker Robert Wilson. Relative Calm (below), created by Wilson and choreographer Lucinda Childs, (presented by the Festival at the impressive ­Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon), boasts often exhilarating dance and stunning costume and lighting design.

(Image: Lucie Jansch)

However, one is less impressed by its ­juxtaposition of projected video (of stampeding wildebeest, for example) with self-consciously poetic, but surprisingly ungenerous text.

The Portuguese element of the programme ­included a strong production of Beyond ­Caring, English playwright Alexander Zeldin’s 2014 play about low-paid shift workers in a meat factory. Directed in the studio of Teatro ­Municipal for Companhia de Teatro de Almada by Francisco himself, the production succeeded in ­expressing the numbing, menacing ­mundanity and the bleak comedy of the play.

Also a Portuguese highlight was a good and faithful outing for Medicine, the superb, ­absurdist play about mental health care by Irish dramatist Enda Walsh (which had its world ­premiere at the Edinburgh International ­Festival in 2021). Directed by António Simão for the Artistas Unidos company of Lisbon, the ­production (staged at Fórum Municipal Romeu Correia in Almada) showed a real understanding of the deep pathos, underlying anger and Ionesco-style absurd humour of Walsh’s drama.

Indeed, when – shortly after leaving Almada – I got to the west coast of Ireland, Paul Fahy, the excellent artistic director of the Galway ­International Arts Festival (GIAF) told me that Walsh had been over to Portugal to see Simão’s staging of Medicine. I’m pleased to report that the Irish playwright expressed himself happy with the production in Almada.

Medicine (which transferred from Edinburgh to Galway in 2021), was, like all of Walsh’s ­theatrical work, co-produced by GIAF. Indeed, this year in Galway (where the festival ends ­today) there are two of the playwright’s drama installations, known as Rooms.

In a converted shed on Galway docks, ­audiences are offered the world premiere of ­Dining Room, in which the recorded, ­disembodied voice of the superb Aaron ­Monaghan offers us a comic ­monologue about a vengeful B&B owner who has been ­one-starred on Tripadvisor.

There’s also a ­deserved ­revival of Changing Room, a ­powerful ­reflection – voiced beautifully by ­Marty Rea – on ­bereavement, brotherhood, regret and ­homosexual self-discovery in an ­Ireland that was, then, emerging slowly from under the cloak of religious prohibition.

However, the undoubted highlight of my four days in Galway was the staging of Samuel ­Beckett’s great play Endgame, directed by the great Garry Hynes for her famous Druid ­Theatre Company. Performed at Galway’s Town Hall Theatre, the production boasts an exceptional set by designer Francis O’Connor.

Much has been said about how the play’s site of post-apocalyptic refuge – which is circular with two windows on the world placed high above the action – is reminiscent of the inside of a human skull. In this case, that similarity is striking, with the humanoid interior also ­taking on the grey, solid appearance of a nuclear ­bunker.

(Image: Ros Kavanagh)

Endgame (above) is written like an exquisite string quartet – something by Béla Bartók or Leoš Janáček, perhaps. One bad note threatens to overturn the entire apple cart.

As ever with the exceptional Druid company, however, Hynes has assembled a magnificent cast. Aaron Monaghan (again) is gloriously comic and more than typically sympathetic in the role of Clov, the limping servant, who ­cannot sit and does not know why he continues to wait on the blind dictator Hamm.

Hamm himself is played with more than usual energy, a touch less grumbling self-pity, by the fabulous Rory Nolan. The result – assisted by the bleakly comic double act of Bosco Hogan and Marie Mullen as Nagg and Nell, the unfortunate ancients who are confined to bins – is an Endgame that enquires (of us, of itself) with an uncommon degree of humanism.

There was, in Galway, more – much more – humanistic enquiry in Unspeakable ­Conversations, a superb new work that had its world premiere at the Druid company’s lovely Mick Lally Theatre. Played by disabled ­English actors Liz Carr and Mat Fraser –who have, respectively, muscular dystrophy and ­thalidomide-induced phocomelia – the piece was inspired by a New York Times Magazine ­article from 2003 in which the late ­American lawyer, author and disability rights activist ­Harriet ­McBryde Johnson wrote about her Princeton University debate with the ­Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

Singer, famously (or infamously), argues in favour of what Johnson (accurately) described as “selective infanticide” of certain categories of disabled children (an opinion that is widely considered to pollute his progressive views on a raft of other issues).

Unsurprisingly, his appointment as professor of bioethics at Princeton led to protests by disability rights campaigners.

In the play (which was created by Christian O’Reilly in collaboration with Carr, Fraser and Olwen Fouéré) Carr and Fraser alternate ­between performing the roles of Johnson and Singer, and reflecting on their own ­experiences as disabled people. The piece is, by turns, ­generous (not least to Singer, despite his ­eugenicism), very humorous and (justifiably) angry.

Carefully calibrated and superbly performed, it is a brilliant, highly original theatre work of which we will, I suspect, be hearing a lot more.

As I travelled back from Galway, I reflected on my experiences both there and in Almada. I realised that, were the Edinburgh International Festival programme to include the works I had just seen by Nadj, Stein, Hynes and O’Reilly et al, Edinburgh audiences would consider ­themselves very blessed indeed.