Sleep on agenda as arts festival ends

By JOSIE McNAUGHT

I'm a crabby old bag this week and I lay the blame solely on the festival tent.

Its success as a late-night festival venue on Wellington's much-discussed but woefully underused waterfront has no doubt left much of the city's population with croaky voices and saggy eyelids.

Despite the hype surrounding the high spots of Courtney Place's nightlife, we must be starved of a decent venue that is part-bar and part-performance venue, if you look at the numbers heading for the tent, as it is already fondly known around town.

The tent's ability to stay put in 80km/h northerly wind gusts will always ensure it has a warm welcome in Wellington.

But while it's a cute place to swig some wine, with its circular wooden layout, cosy booths and paua shell inlay, it is the people we have come to see, and they haven't disappointed.

British performer John Hegley is well known for his comedy festival gigs. His mix of poetry, one-liners, songs and running patter was perfect for the solid Tuesday night audience.

No one's out to get smashed on a Tuesday - there's still a lot of the week to go and probably something brilliant on the telly - but the festival makes you do peculiar things, and there we were, still slightly stunned that we'd managed to stay awake until 9.30pm to watch our man perform.

And perform he did. With deadpan delivery and Islington vowels shimmying out of the corner of his mouth, he used his poems and the stories behind them to great effect.

If nothing else, his odes to the myopically challenged won him many fans. In a sort of mass pass at everyone wearing glasses, he had us pitying the contact-lens wearers as he reeled off poems and songs about our facewear.

Finding someone to accompany me to folk singer Eliza Carthy later in the week was difficult. The wooden beads, guitars and songs about misery and herbs that we associate with this genre are a real turnoff.

Well, this was folksinging, folks, but not as we know it. Carthy is more singer than folk. Shiny bright blond hair, chic black clothes and a violin with attitude made for a great evening.

The music is still probably an acquired taste, but just when we'd had enough of what she described as pain and misery she upped the tempo with one of her saucy compositions that had the capacity crowd clapping and cheering.

Her wry observations on the traditional songs mixed with anecdotes about her life as a folksinger were also entertaining.

She is that rare thing, a self-deprecating folksinger who doesn't take it all too seriously but is a good singer and musician.

And on it goes. It's Monday evening, so it must be comedian Boothby Graffoe and another late-night gig filled to the brim. Graffoe's real name is James Rogers, which doesn't sound half as daft as his adopted moniker.

He is a gag-a-second man, with a lovely line in split personalities with interesting accents, and plenty of jokes about Wellington, George Bush, Saddam and weapons of mass destruction to keep the enthusiastic but polite punters happy.

He didn't have to grapple with hecklers or witty interjections, but you felt he would have relished any verbal sparring that came his way.

In the end, it was a one-drink-and-we'd-better-head-back-to-the-suburbs kinda crowd.

After all, this frivolous after-hours activity has to stop sometime.

You can definitely sense the festival is coming to a close and life as we know it in Wellington will return to normal. And I'll get some sleep.