Triumphs and Turkeys 2001

THEATRE

For the National Theatre, the technical challenge of staging the five complex plays of Tom Murphy at the Abbey: Six Plays at the same time was immense. It was a return to the old days of the repertory system but without the safety net of a repertory company. Yet it was executed with an aplomb that reflected very well on the institution as a whole.

Much more importantly, though, the season was a fine homecoming for the most restless, angular and courageous imagination in Irish theatre. Murphy's stature should never have been in doubt, but the serpentine course of his career and the varied nature of the forms he has mastered worked against due recognition. Seeing five plays, written over the course of three decades, in the space of a fortnight raised the question: how many other living playwrights anywhere have produced such a rich body of work? The answer that emerged from the ultimate testing-ground of the stage was very few indeed.

The season also made it clear just why Murphy is so original and so hard to pigeonhole. He is neither a naturalist nor an expressionist but a fabulist, a creator of daringly imagined stories. From the hard-edged realism of A Whistle in the Dark to the fairytale forest of The Morning After Optimism, from the Irish baroque of Bailegangaire to the European expressionism of The Sanctuary Lamp to the wild soaring arias of The Gigli Concert, it is all in the stories. Told as confidently as they were here, those stories form a mythology of their own.

At the same time, and rather paradoxically, the season also demythologised Murphy. Performances like those of Pauline Flanagan and Derbhle Crotty in Bailegangaire and Owen Roe and Mark Lambert in Gigli liberated the plays from the legends that Siobhan Mc Kenna, Godfrey Quigley and Tom Hickey had forged in the original productions.

Another high, also at the Abbey, is worth mentioning, not least because it is not just retrospective. Eugene O'Brien's extraordinary dΘbut at the Peacock, Eden, makes him the most interesting new voice of the year. The play has moved upstairs to the main stage, and is the perfect antidote to all the seasonal clichΘs.

The Abbey's own indecision about its physical future is one of the year's lowlights. With the present building coming to the end of what was never a very satisfactory life, the need to garner public and political support for an inevitably expensive new home is urgent. Uncertainty about whether to stay on the present site or move to a new southside location has been a damaging own-goal. Especially because, as the economic climate darkens, the task of persuading governments to come up with the necessary money has been made unnecessarily complex.

Fintan O'Toole

CLASSICAL

This has been a year of remarkable change. Both the National Symphony Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra acquired new principal conductors, and a similar change is in the offing for the Irish Chamber Orchestra. The ICO's acquisition is the most prestigious. Nicholas McGegan is one of the world's leading period-instruments conductors, a well-known recording artist, with a track record in opera and with conventional orchestras, to boot. And baroque music is one of those areas on which the ICO has yet to make its mark on fully. Gerhard Markson's work with the NSO is that of a solid craftsman, painstakingly working at the fundamentals on which future achievements can be built. As things stand, his most impressive work has been in the area of contemporary music, which he delivers with a sympathetic exactitude which has not been this orchestra's wont. Thierry Fischer seems to be a wider-ranging talent, as comfortable in the baroque as in the present, and with a desire to take both players and audiences into new and exciting realms.

Topping the list of the year's memorable performances is Messiaen's exotic song-cycle Harawi, a surreal vision of sexual longing, performed with uncompromising concentration by Charlotte Riedijk (soprano) and Joanna MacGregor (piano) at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. The West Cork festival now sits at the pinnacle of musical offerings in Ireland. The new ESB Vogler Spring Festival has adopted a stronger identity, where Schoenberg, Szymanowski and N°rgσrd can stir the audience as readily as anything more mainstream. And at Kilkenny Arts Festival guest programmer, French cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras, was central to the strengthening of the musical fare in an event where standard had been eroding. Both the Belfast Festival (where Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling made the strongest impression) and the Irish Chamber Orchestra's Killaloe Music Festival (with a mesmerising visitor in Portuguese pianist Maria Joπo Pires) are also on the up. And the Irish Youth Wind Ensemble's commission from Jennifer Walshe, small small big, reinforced the impression that she is one of the most daring musical voices to emerge from Ireland in a long time.

'Melodies and Themes' is the absurdly twee name RT╔ gave to the Strauss and Mozart programmes of the National Symphony Orchestra's current season. Come on, lads, lets get down to basics. How about 'Crotchets and Quavers'? Or 'Double Sharps and Double Flats' if the music is more challenging?

Michael Dervan

OPERA

What a year for opera! Opera Ireland reached forward, to Mark-Anthony Turnage's Silver Tassie, and backwards, to Handel's Giulio Cesare - both important firsts in the company's history - and was then uncovered as having anything but a rosy future, with a declared accumulated deficit of over £400,000. Is this the legacy of artistic adventure or the fruit of financial mismanagement? The Arts Council's view will be crucial to the company's future. The council is being asked, not for the first time, for a "once-off" bail out, on this occasion a cool £300,000, on top of a curtailment of next year's activities.

The winter season's inclusion of the almost universally panned Don Carlo by artistic director, Dieter Kaegi, could hardly have come at a worse time.

The Wexford Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary in unusual style, with what I suspect is the worst ever crop of reviews from British critics.

In other circles, Dvorβk's Jakob∅n was generally greeted as this year's winner, with Massenet's Sapho also in contention. The government has remained silent on the festival's pleas for its proposed £20 million building programme of renovation and expansion. The prospects for this project seem a lot less healthy facing into 2002 than they did a mere 12 months ago.

Seβn ╙ Tβrpaigh's Opera Theatre Company production of The Beggar's Opera as arranged by Benjamin Britten has to have been one of the most numbingly dull offerings seen on the Irish operatic stage in years.

Michael Dervan

TRADITIONAL and ROOTS

Memorable gigs have been stockpiling over the past 12 months. The highs have been indisputable: Maighread, Tr∅ona and Micheβl ╙ Domhnaill soaring in the stratosphere of The Shelter, Christy Moore, D≤nal Lunny and Declan Sinnott merging molecules in Lisdoonvarna, Dervish's reinvention of themselves in Headford, and Suzana Baca's blissfully lithe vocal hi-jinks in Vicar Street.

There was Seamus Creagh and Jackie Daly infusing low key with a positively subterranean essence at Castleisland's Patrick O'Keeffe Festival, and Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill engaging in a heart-stopping musical trigonometry in the Olympia. Alison Brown and Stacey Earle reminded us that bluegrass and country can rarely be beaten for sheer chutzpah and style.

The much-anticipated visit from the Buena Vista Social Club was marred by appalling venue provisions and even more unacceptable treatment of local residents. Last but not least, Gillian Welch's late cancellation of her Olympia gig left many of us gaping at the vacuum with ne'er a sign of a re-scheduled date.

Siobhβn Long

ROCK

If you were Stanley Kubrick, making a futuristic rock 'n' roll movie set in 2001, then you might visualise vast motherships rising out of the orchestra pit, musicians hovering on giant floating monoliths, and the audience wearing visors to protect them from the retina-searing glare of the nuclear-powered lightshow. The reality, however, was a little more earthbound, and Kubrick would probably have snorted in derision at the ordinariness of it all. Dazzling pyrotechnics, multiple costume changes and 40ft lemons were conspicuously absent from the live scene. The only glitter to be seen was the twinkling of brass tacks, as bands got down to basics, concentrating on the music rather than the showbiz.

Even U2 scaled down their usually over-the-top stage show, giving us not much to look at, but plenty to listen to and savour at Slane Castle. Reading the mood of the times, Bono, Edge, Larry and Adam correctly surmised that we had all overdosed on eye-candy, so they replaced the world's biggest screen with four smaller screens, one for each member of the band. Instead of visual overload, we got an elegant sufficiency of sound and inner vision. It was a beautiful day, the band were just a little short of their best, and I even got to meet Samantha Mumba. Pukka!

It was left to Robbie Williams to provide the spectacle at Lansdowne Road, but even he kept the fireworks down to a reasonable level.

The drinks sponsors went head-to-head with two big festivals this year.

Heineken threw the first punch with this summer's Green Energy Festival, bringing the Buena Vista Social Club and Manic Street Preachers to Smithfield, and putting Travis into Dublin Castle. Guinness hit back with Witnness, two days of rock 'n' roll fun and frolics in Fairyhouse, featuring 60 acts ranging from Stereophonics to Super Furry Animals.

The best indoor gigs of the year were in the Olympia, and included superb - sometimes unpredictable - shows by Nick Cave, Badly Drawn Boy, Dandy Warhols, St. Germain (I missed it!), Eels and Air. Vicar St hosted the welcome return of Television, while new music venue the Ambassador was the setting for a fine concert by Mercury Rev. The Point, on the other hand, just gets duller and more depressing, and the fewer gigs I have to endure there in 2002, the better.

Travis at Dublin Castle in June. They've become a softer version of the Bellamy Brothers, and turned being boring into a virtue. A Travis-ty.

Kevin Courtney

JAZZ

For the year's jazz highlight it was a very close call between a couple of memorable events. One was the magnificent concert given early on by Ronan Guilfoyle's Khanda and the Karnataka College of Percussion, beautifully blending Irish, jazz and Indian elements in an exhilarating performance in Vicar Street. They had just come back from a tour and were so on top of the music that the concert was a joy from start to finish. The other came during the Dublin Jazz Festival, when French accordionist Richard Galliano took his trio, also into Vicar Street, and produced music of surpassing beauty and charm which he called "New Musette". It was simultaneously contemporary and a throwback to the music of the French demi-mondaine cafΘs and bars associated with the old black-and-white policiers of pre-war French movies.

Galliano gets the call, if only because of what he did with Astor Piazzola's Libertango and his own Beritwaltz and La Valse a Margaux. It was absolutely magical.

And the lowlight? That has to have been when a certain internationally renowned musician turned up - for a duo concert - with a third party that may have been called Johnnie Walker. Enough said.

Ray Comiskey

VISUAL ART

One of the year's visual arts triumphs was certainly Marina Abramovic's performance at weekend at IMMA, Marking the Territory. Apart from the fact that it was a huge logistical exercise (involving curators Sarah Glennie and latterly Annie Fletcher) it attracted an extraordinary level of interest. You could say that the museum was as lively throughout the weekend as it should be all the time. Abramovic is an evangelist of performance and she came to the project armed with a combative thesis, to the effect that, after languishing throughout the 1980s, performance has steadily regained relevance and vitality throughout the last decade and is poised on the brink of a wonderful future. She creditably made her weekend a showcase for younger performance artists, rather than revisiting past glories. By no means everything presented throughout the weekend lived up to the hype but there were outstanding individual performers and a undeniable collective buzz. Case not proven, perhaps, but with advocates like Abramovic, performance has a fighting chance. And perhaps the ultimate significance of Marking the Territory is that its influence is likely to percolate through the growing ranks of art school and college students.

Another triumph was the smooth executive transition at IMMA.Oh no, it wasn't! It is ironic that throughout a year when the museum put on some outstanding shows and events, including Rebecca Horn, Shirin Neshat and Marking the Territory, and reported very good attendance figures, its public profile was dominated by internal political controversy. Nor was such controversy limited to IMMA. There were also significant levels of upset and acrimony at the Project and the City Arts Centre (which ceases to exist in its present form from the end of the year), and storm clouds are reputedly gathering over another cultural institution. Does the problem lie with arts administration and stewardship - once considered a sort of gentleman's club - or with the intersection of politics and culture?

Aidan Dunne

DANCE

Although several art forms can lay claim to her genius, Meredith Monk was rightfully claimed by the Irish dance world. Her visit to Dublin in October was organised by Irish Modern Dance Theatre and although the headline event was a concert in the SFX, her films and talks illustrated that it is the impulse of movement that still drives her artistry.

The crammed SFX was a contrast to the 20 or so people who gathered around a large table for Welsh performer Eddie Ladd's supper on Holy Thursday at the Project Arts Centre. Weaving the stories of the deaths of Jesus Christ, Yuri Gregarin and a Welsh farmer killed by his own bull, Ladd hoisted herself above the table on a harness, orbited the table while projecting tiny images onto the table, and at times sat down at the table and conversed about the piece. After an hour the audience filed out of the space after members of her technical crew came around to each individual and whispered in his or her ear that the performance had ended.

This type of quiet spectacle was also evident in Rebecca Walter's works for the Dublin Fringe, performed in a cramped corridor and a launderette. Her Catapult Dance Theatre and Fergus O'Choghuir's Corp Feasa emerged this year and hopefully are the first of the long-awaited next generation of choreographers. Young, but experienced, Liz Roche picked up a British New Choreography Award in October and her company Rex Levitates continues to blossom.

Meredith Monk and the Acts of Criticism seminar in Cork were both highly successful but the Critical Voices programme, with just two dance events, failed to reflect the range of criticism and discourse within all forms of dance. At an important time in dance's evolution this was an opportunity missed.

Michael Seaver