On The Town

The siege of Hugh Lane: The drummer bashing out Frank Sinatra standards in the corner of the foyer of the revamped Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane had been here many times before.

Desi Reynolds recalled a time in the 1960s when he took to the stage in what is now the new €13 million extension but was formerly the National Ballroom.

"Back then Parnell Square was bursting with dance halls," said Reynolds. "It's a little bit different now."

A group of topless (male) tribal drummers could be found moving to a very different beat elsewhere in the gallery as 1,000 art lovers sloshed in out of the rain to appraise the Manets and the Renoir and the new Sean Scully room.

Performance artist Amanda Coogan, fresh from her Beckett piece, Breath, at Project, enthused about a video piece she had just completed for Limerick City Gallery of Art.

"It's basically 30 women in pink doing aerobics," she explained, adding that the work was named The Siege after the Siege of Limerick.

There was a siege around the bar of the Hugh Lane gallery for most of Thursday night, with the music and speeches interrupted by the occasional sound of wine glasses smashing on the stone floor, casualties of the scrum.

Up on the second floor, sculptor friends Jennie Moran and Tara Kennedy from Ranelagh were comparatively calm as they glided around the gallery. Moran cut a striking figure in a €10 coat dress from Dublin's Wild Child vintage store.

The equally stylish Kennedy, one of the artists behind the planting of used Christmas trees on Sandymount Strand early this year, said the pair were off to Milan for an artists' symposium in the summer.

Outside, as her children played around a labyrinth installation, artist Felicity Clear was delighted to talk about a less well-publicised exhibition of work on the third floor, which was created by the Active Retirement Group she works with.

"They are called the Academy Without Walls and it's wonderful that their work is on show, especially during Bealtaine," she said.

Chances are some of those artists danced here back in the day to the beat of Desi Reynolds. www.hughlane.ie

Classical highs at a birthday bash: The National Concert Hall hit the high notes last Wednesday when it unveiled its 2006/2007 programme. The coming season marks the NCH's 25th anniversary, and it is pulling out all the stops for its birthday year.

Pianist Finghin Collins, just finishing a successful five-year stint on the board of directors, said it's an "exciting line-up". The programme includes eight internationally renowned orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra. "It's great to have them coming to Dublin," said Collins, who has just returned from London where his debut concerts with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra were "well received".

Cellist Gerald Peregrine was looking forward to the season. He will perform in a chamber music concert in June, when his album, Heavenly, will be coming out - "a collection of jazz standards on cello", is how he described it.

Although her venue is closing, Dorothy Gray, of the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, came to show her support. The arts centre will shut its doors later this summer. Gray's friend, Ann Daly, head of marketing at the National Museum of Ireland, commiserated; nevertheless, her venue is still going strong, with an exhibition of military history opening later in the year, as well as Kingship and Sacrifice in Iron Age Ireland, an exhibition "to do with the bog bodies".

Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue applauded Dermot Egan, outgoing chairman of the board, for making "an enormous contribution" to the NCH.

The final word, however, belonged to Newstalk 106 presenter and rugby pundit George Hook. Describing himself as a "cultural philistine", he noted ticket prices for concerts were less than the cost for rugby matches, and that's "good value for money", he said. Christine Madden

Waiting for Beckett relief: A new month, a new show, and producer Noel Pearson at the opening of Aurélia's Oratorio at the Abbey on Wednesday night was looking forward to the "great relief from Beckett" this enchanting trompe l'oeil physical theatre promised.

"I think we're all Becketted out," he said in the upstairs lobby bar.

He was keeping his next moves quiet - "the film world is very precarious" - but he did say he was at planning stages for a documentary on the life of actor Richard Harris.

Producer Zhaohui Wang from China, joined Aoife White, general manager of Pan Pan theatre company for the opening. Zhaohui was involved in Pan Pan's Chinese production of Playboy of the Western World in March. "We turned it into Chinese and set it in Beijing in a hairdresser's shop during the Chinese New Year," she said. It was "well received locally", commented White. "We loved bringing it to China, it worked so well."

Director Matt Torney is counting the days before the autumn, when he will take up studies at Columbia University's master's programme in theatre directing with Anne Bogart. "Several hundred applied for six places," he said, and he is the first Irish director chosen for the programme. Until then, he's scrounging cash together from various less prestigious jobs, hoping to raise the money for the programme.

"I'm very prickly," actor Peter Hanly warned. He as well as other cast members of the Abbey's upcoming production of Brian Friel's A Month in the Country have taken the advice of designer Joe Vanek, who "encouraged any men who wanted to grow a beard".

No women, Hanly said with relief, have taken Vanek up on it.

Don Wycherly, who will play the "doctor, charlatan, rogue" in the production, also sported a bit of facial fuzz, and had his daughter Katie and her friend Caoimhe Ní Bhroin, both aged nine, in tow. He was there because "there was a good buzz in the building about the show". Katie and Caoimhe were looking forward to the dancing - the Scoil Neasáin pupils both do hip-hop classes.

Director Annie Ryan, writer Morna Regan and actors Aidan Kelly and Paul Meade also came to the opening. Christine Madden

Tales from a reunion: The beautiful game took something of a back seat at a reception to mark the publication of a new book by The Irish Times Rome correspondent and soccer writer, Paddy Agnew, this week. Forza Italia: A Journey in Search of Italy and Its Football is as much about his experiences of his adopted country's distinctive political and social systems during 21 years living there, as it is a study of Italian football.

Held at Village Books (then next door for appropriately themed grub in That's Amore) in Malahide, Co Dublin, it served as something of a reunion for one of the early Magill journalistic line ups with Vincent Browne overseeing matters, while some of Agnew's former colleagues at the magazine - Gene Kerrigan, now of the Sunday Independent and Pat Brennan, these days a news producer in RTÉ - mingled with writer and former Irish Times arts editor Paddy Woodworth, retired publisher Phillip McDermott and the author's many friends and relatives.

Browne joked about the days when Agnew's racing tips had formed an important part of the finances of first Magill and then the Sunday Tribune. "It was his expertise in this area that enabled us to get the Tribune off the ground the first time around," said the Irish Times columnist. Later Brennan, Kerrigan and Agnew recalled how a series of pieces by Browne on the arms trial unnerved printers and distributors of the magazine to the extent that it briefly had to be produced in England with copies then delivered around the country in a van driven by the journalists themselves.

Accompanying Agnew were his wife, Dympna Hayes, a lecturer in English who will be a local election candidate for the leftist Civic List in their hometown, Trevignano Romano, and the couple's daughter Roísín. Emmet Malone

• Forza Italia, A Journey in Search of Italy and Its Football by Paddy Agnew, is published by Ebury Press (£10.99)