Flashback 2004 Theatre: Some events, such as 'Improbable Frequency', were welcome. Others, such as the Abbey's crisis, were not. Belinda McKeon looks back.

Back in January, when the Polish company TR Warszawa visited the Abbey with its bold and beautiful Festen, a visually thrilling, adventurously directed version of Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 film, weary questions did the rounds of Irish theatre.

Where, they asked, was the home-grown work of this scale and confidence? Where, after another year marked by caution and restraint, were the companies with the resources to make such bracing, memorable theatre here? And, although those deficient resources were argued to be largely financial, was not a poverty of imagination suggesting itself more and more?

The earliest work of 2004 only supported this gloomy suspicion. Granted, there were few desperately flawed productions in the first few months of the year: some disappointments and a decided lack of surprises, but no real disasters. At the Abbey Patrick Mason directed a robust production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, in the handsome inflections of Tom Murphy's new version. At the Gate Joe Dowling's new Dancing At Lughnasa was interesting for the darkness it lured from Brian Friel's play. Both productions included some fine performances, and several productions elsewhere, particularly at Project, illustrated the superb quality of Irish actors and showed that the pool of directing talent, whilst familiar, remains rich.

In January Owen Roe shone as the troubled widower of David Hare's Skylight (produced by Landmark, a new company); in February Lynne Parker drew largely compelling turns from the cast of two new plays for Rough Magic, Gerald Murphy's Take Me Away and Ionna Anderson's Words Of Advice For Young People; in March Eamonn Owens made a convincing stage début in Fishamble's production of a new play from Michael Collins, Tadhg Stray Wandered In.

Here were strong performances and accomplished direction. Here, from the latter two companies, were fine new plays; Murphy and Anderson brought fresh perspectives to the Irish family, trapping adult children in situations where emotional and sexual tensions inevitably, and powerfully, erupt, while, in Tadhg Stray, Collins created a strong character, at once moving and wittily self-deprecating. These were promising plays - but plays that remained promising rather than fully seeing that promise through on stage, and this was a worrying predicament. Moments, indeed scenes, of excellence were frustratingly shadowed by the sense of excess or irresolution in the writing; too many themes, too many issues at once, distracting subplots or digressions.

This had been the problem with David Hare's 1995 play, which hoisted its characters onto too many socio-political bandwagons to allow them to develop as individuals; in the Irish plays, which tunnelled through wider political contexts to explore deeply private predicaments, a similarly darting focus fuelled a niggling sense that new Irish writing, while improving, was marked by a difficulty with characterisation and control that might take years to surmount.

The Peacock's production of Defender Of The Faith, the first play from Stuart Carolan, offered much greater reason to be cheerful about the Irish writer's ability to tackle big issues. But upstairs, at the Abbey, a production of Seamus Heaney's Burial At Thebes, a new version of Sophocles's Antigone, produced the opposite effect, with a striking and evocative text overpowered by a mixture of stasis and crudity in its staging; characters seemed to belong to different plays, and the final scene, in which the body of Ruth Negga's defeated Antigone hung over the stage in a fury of sound and light, was merely embarrassing, a theatrical spectacle in the worst sense.

Through all of this the international visitors to the National Theatre continued to show just how magnificent spectacle can be: László Marton's Dance In Time, a whirling dervish of a production that explores Hungarian history and identity through music, movement and dance, brought Abbey audiences to their feet during its too-short run.

That was March. Already that month Sabine Dargent's magical sculptural set for Fishamble's Tadhg Stray - the giant cogs and wheels of a vast wooden mechanism, like a strange, moving clock of the mind - had chimed out a possibility of something new and potentially exhilarating on the Irish stage. It suggested that the notion of new writing, always so central to our understanding of the development of Irish theatre, might finally be supplanted by that of "new work", a notion in which directors, designers and performers play roles just as primary as that of writers.

The first realisation of that possibility came in April, with Pan Pan's innovative, intelligent and visually splendid treatment of Shakespeare. Mac-Beth 7, directed by Gavin Quinn and designed by Andrew Clancy and AedíCosgrove, both respected and probed the text in a mosaic of opera, video and performance that avoided gimmickry through clarity of purpose.

Another question emerged. This astute, stylish creation, this large-scale ambition matched by confident accomplishment: was this Irish theatre? Over the next six months a series of superb new productions, all of them Irish, showed that it was. They were inventive, original, engaging, colourful and witty yet weighty and thought provoking, memorable in design and fresh in composition.

The Shaughraun, which took hold at the Abbey for the entire summer and has now returned for an extended winter run, was not one of them. Stewart Parker's Heavenly Bodies, which ran downstairs from John McColgan's cauldron of charm stew throughout July, and which explored The Shaughraun's creator, Dion Boucicault, with irony and compassion, definitely was. So too were Barabbas's typically frenetic A Midsummer Night's Dream, at Project, and Performance Corporation's absurdly conceived The Butterfly Ranch, which re-envisioned performance and perspective with its two-tier stage at SS Michael & John.

Corcadorca's site-specific production Losing Steam was directed at the site of the former Ford factory in Cork by Pat Kiernan; involving a large community cast, Ray Scannell's play explored the relationship between a city and an industry through music and drama in an acclaimed take on the history play.

Bedrock's production of Caryl Churchill's Far Away, at Project in July, was a sharp shock of verbal restraint and visual intensity; Jimmy Fay's realisation of the hat parade of Churchill's condemned prisoners was both beautiful and distressing.

The hit of Galway Arts Festival, meanwhile, was its production of Mark Doherty's Trad, which premièred at Druid Lane Theatre (Druid itself also had a successful year, realising three plays of its Synge Cycle project). Trad was as deeply funny as might be expected from a former comedian's take on Irish literary, theatrical and religious traditions, but it was pleasantly surprising, too, in the richness and sensitivity of its characterisation.

When b*spoke's Jane Brennan and Ingrid Craigie made the spiky social comedy of David Mamet's Boston Marriage deliciously their own in August, even as, at the Peacock, Colm Tóibín's Beauty In A Broken Place was taking a wry and interrogative glass to the awkward dynamic of Yeats, O'Casey and Lady Gregory, it became obvious that something was happening to Irish theatre.

Suddenly, even as the National Theatre veered between apparently unending internal crises, Irish theatre seemed to be in a good way. The Dublin Theatre Festival triumph of Rough Magic's Improbable Frequency, a musical satire on Ireland's wartime neutrality by Arthur Riordan and Bell Helicopter, and the recent Corn Exchange production of Dublin By Lamplight, an outstanding feat of collaboration by the members of that company with Michael West, provided the sense that things were getting better, more clever and more confident by the month. The productions exemplified everything that was good about this wave oftheatre, with sharp composition, visual ingenuity and a mordant, racing humour that left no institution unturned. Insecurity complexes at Festen had, it seemed, been unjustified.

But problems persist. In financial terms - which is what the conversation about Irish theatre still tends to come back to, perhaps especially in the light of the Abbey's troubles - this upturn may be attributed to the return, for several companies, to the levels of Arts Council subsidy that preceded the cuts of December 2002 - or, in some instances, to much higher levels of funding. Pan Pan and Rough Magic were among the companies to receive increases of more than €40,000 on their 2003 funding, and the extra revenue has evidently been put to good use. It's refreshing, certainly, to see companies mounting more than one production a year; more refreshing still would be to see what a larger number of companies could do, given the resources.

Vital imaginative resources are still lacking in too many quarters. Abbey bashing may seem to have become a national sport, but the hard fact is that, on the grounds of the artistic programme with which the National Theatre this year celebrated its centenary, criticism is well founded. That Improbable Frequency is to move to the Abbey next spring (and there are rumours, too, that the Corn Exchange production may appear at the Peacock) is a good thing, but why did this work not emerge from the National Theatre in the first place? Why not Improbable Frequency for the Abbey's Dublin Theatre Festival fortnight rather than an elaborate chain of worthwhile but ultimately cautious revivals from the canon? Only Conall Morrison's production of George Fitzmaurice's The Dandy Dolls roused any excitement; a sense of wasted opportunity persists.

Other disappointments are scattered beyond the doors of the Abbey; not just the closure of small venues, including the Crypt and Bewley's Café Theatre, which were so vital to smaller companies, but the persistence, despite the summer's high, of the shoddy productions that result from underdeveloped writing. Perhaps the starkest, and actually the most saddening, example of this was Conor McPherson's Shining City (produced at the Gate during Dublin Theatre Festival), whose marvellous characters were insufficiently realised and whose sensitive observations were marred by a deeply ill-advised ending.

With luck, collaboration will soar in 2005 from the strong base it has established; alongside this, however, must come some solution to the rut in which the Irish playwright seems trapped. We can, after all, have both.

Take five...

. . . dramatic moments

1 Resignations Dublin Theatre Festival director Fergus Linehan announced his resignation in March (he's now artistic director and chief executive of the Sydney Festival); Dublin Fringe Festival director Vallejo Gantner resigned in May (he's now artistic director of the P. S. 122 theatre, in New York). German-born director Wolfgang Hoffman takes over the fringe; the Canadian director Don Shipley is at DTF.

2 Drama at the Abbey Staff cuts, secret e-mails, reports, emergency meetings, emergency bailout.

3 Walkouts at Dublin Theatre Festival The spectacle of the controversial Italian director Romeo Castellucci's Tragedia Endogonidia was something to behold, but the real drama may have taken place outside - where audience members trekked in disgust, dismay and bewilderment at the casting of an infant, the bloody beating of a prisoner and the white noise and static that accompanied the performance; others applauded rapturously.

4 Most memorable set Audiences in the O'Reilly Theatre whooped and cheered when the back wall of Rough Magic's musical satire Improbable Frequency turned over to reveal a mammoth mechanism towering over the stage, Arthur Riordan's creation in perhaps the most talked-about show of the year.

5 PR stunt of the year Not Ben Barnes's e-mail but the decision of Red Kettle, the Waterford theatre company, to publicise its production of Lord Of The Flies by nailing 30 pigs' heads to stakes around the city. Motorists, local authorities and animal-welfare activists were not amused, Red Kettle apologised - and the publicity was gained.