It was a very good year for Irish theatre. It was a year of consolidation for the burgeoning newer and smaller companies around the country and it was a year of expansion of live theatre in centres outside of Dublin and Cork so that, if one was to see everything on offer, nearly half of one's theatre-going time would be spent, as Dion Boucicault phrased it, "out of town". It was also a year which brought an increasing number of productions acted with a fine sense of ensemble performance, a year in which some young and some established authors set their ambitions admirably high (which augurs well for the future) and, above all, it was a year of high creativity in both quality and quantity.
A scan of the newspaper cuttings revealed something of the order of 40 new works for the stage in Ireland before the count was abandoned and, of course, the export of Irish dramatic art continued apace with, for instance, the Druid Theatre making the big breakthrough on to Broadway with Martin McDonogh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane and well-deserved Tony Awards for its director Garry Hynes and for actors Marie Mullen, Anna Manahan and Tom Murphy.
There was also a most welcome development in the importation of the bulk of Conor McPherson's work from London and the belated arrival in Ireland of Billy Roche's ambitious Amphibians, restaged by the author in the Wexford YMCA more effectively than it had originally been presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Pit in the Barbican in London. And we still await the arrival in Ireland of McPherson's most diverting St Nicholas, which this reviewer saw in New York during the year with Brian Cox vastly entertaining as a drink-soaked errant Dublin theatre critic.
Which brings us to the necessarily eclectic memories of theatre in Ireland during 1998, with apologies (as usual) to those creative theatre artists whose shows went unseen by this reviewer.
Gary Mitchell served twice to remind that he is still very much a force in the land: Tearing the Loom at the Lyric in Belfast offered a rare theatrical insight into the political complexities of the United Irishmen in Ulster while As the Beast Sleeps at the Peacock in Dublin provided another terrifying glimpse of inarticulate rage in a conflict of loyalties, compromise and corruption in today's post-war Belfast. The latter was also, under Conall Morrison's clear direction, one of the many examples of seamless ensemble acting during the year - a compelling work of collective theatre art.
Another fine ensemble of actors brought us Fishamble's premiere performance of The Nun's Wood, excellently directed by Jim Culleton in the Project @ the Mint, marking not only collective excellence in the company but also an auspicious authorial debut by Pat Kinevane, hitherto known primarily as an actor of striking creativity and originality. Mr Kinevane was to come to notice again during the year with his performances in Baby Jane (for Corn Exchange at the Project with Cindy Cummins and Annie Ryan) and as Danny Mann in Conall Morrison's light, lively and entertaining production of The Colleen Bawn at the Abbey - itself one of the best productions of the year.
Another of the year's best productions was Robin Lefevre's Chekhovian rendition of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire at the Gate which did not quite meet the high ensemble standards set by many others but which contained three striking individual performances by Frances McDormand (a notably unfluttery and independently intelligent Blanche Dubois), Liam Cunning- ham (a refreshingly rough and blunt Stanley Kowalski) and Donna Dent (a wonderfully open and warm Stella). And Conall Morrison provided yet another of the year's best productions with Declan Hughes's excellent Dublin-based view of gangsterdom, Twenty Grand, in the Peacock, where ensemble acting triumphed once again in one of the best-crafted plays of the year, splendidly set by Kathy Strachan.
There was another fine setting in Anto Nolan's rambunctious Fully Recovered (Passion Machine's 26th new Irish play) by Anne Gately at the Project, and Robin Don's atmospheric setting at the Gate for A Long Day's Journey Into Night was also notable in an otherwise disappointing production of Eugene O'Neill's classic.
Settings did not matter much in Jason Byrne's two remarkable productions - the razor-sharp Greek for Bedrock, and the flowingly imaginative and excellently acted Coriolanus for Loose Canon - both at the Project. But Ben Hennessy's sprawlingly untidy setting for The Salvage Shop at Red Kettle in Waterford was an integral component of the success of Jim Nolan's lastingly impressive new play, one of the best of 1998, lovingly directed by Ben Barnes with great performances from Niall Toibin and John Olahan as the father and son trying to come to terms with themselves.
Others among the best plays were Conor McPherson's The Weir, a haunting Royal Court production imported from London to the Gate, and Sebastian Barry's Our Lady of Sligo, imported from the Royal National Theatre to the Gate and containing one of the great performances of several years in Sinead Cusack's brave, vulnerable, feisty and harrowing Mai O'Hara on her deathbed, which left this reviewer in tears. Jim Norton's beautifully mannered performance in The Weir left us mostly with sad smiles - lovely professional work.
Two of the best plays of the year were also two of the most ambitious. Tom Murphy's The Wake (with superb settings from Francis O'Connor) attempted what was almost a social and psychological analysis of small town Ireland and was given wonderfully disciplined direction at the Abbey by Patrick Mason, yet another instance of perfect ensemble playing with individually excellent characterisations from all its actors. It suffered from a few longueurs in its opening act but also provided thrillingly good theatre, not least from Jane Brennan as the family outcast returned to settle her score. And Ms Brennan (again with Patrick Mason's direction) gave a quite differently excellent performance as an almost androgynous St Joan in Bernard Shaw's classic, also at the Abbey.
And, in the same theatre with the same excellent director, Marina Carr's new play By the Bog of Cats was this highly creative author's most ambitious play by far, reaching for classic tragedy in almost comically mundane and very depressing circumstances in an Offaly bog. It very nearly worked in its entirety and it boasted one of the best settings of the year - a majestic barren waste of frozen bogland by Monica Frawley - but the set was too grand for the action, which needed something more rurally domestic in scale. The whole did not succeed in its aim of a Medealike catharsis, but it was very impressive nonetheless.
Paul Mercier's Native City, for Passion Machine at the Tivoli, was also immensely ambitious, a chronologically reversed history in small cameos of a couple of centuries of Dublin. Skillfully directed by the author, it was perhaps the most impressive of all the ensemble productions of the year inhabited by a highly athletic and generally hyperactive cast of dozens. Bernard Farrell's Kevin's Bed also inverted time, but on a much smaller scale, and under Ben Barnes's sensitive direction for the Abbey, provided a serious comedy about family failures, notable also for the welcome return to the Dublin stage of Eamon Morrissey as the irascible father of the son who cannot learn to face up to facts.
And then, in the Gate, there was Brian Friel's irresistable new version of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, this reviewer's favourite of the year. Given an identifiably Irish rhythm and distinctively Irish jokes and characters (without ever taking away from the Russian nature of the original) this was the most completely satisfying drama of the year with probably the best performance of the year from Niall Buggy as a sad, yet determined and argumentative Vanya and superb support from Donna Dent (again!) as a heart-rending Sonya, an icy Susannah Harker as Elena and a bombastic T. P. McKenna as Serebryakov against whom Vanya has one of the best dramatic confrontations of the night, and maybe of the year.
It was, in all, a richly rewarding year for which gratitude is due to the legions of creative talents who provided it, many of whom cannot be listed here for reasons of space. And it was spiced just last week by a prodigious performance from Stephen Brennan as that master of panache, Cyrano de Bergerac, in Alan Stanford's excellent production for the Gate of Edmond Rostand's sad and comic play. Here, as in Vanya and as in so much else this year, the ensemble acting was superb indeed.
