Theatres often rely on familiar plays. So revivals are nothing new. But when the Gate’s handsome, terrifically acted production of Dancing at Lughnasa opened, in July, the year had featured so much new work that it felt as if Brian Friel’s sensation from 1990 was the first revival we’d encountered for some time.
Brave new world
That wasn’t quite the case, of course. The year started with Landmark’s slyly good production of Krapp’s Last Tape, the Gaiety’s woolly interpretation of Sive and the Lyric’s storybook-attractive Little Women. After that, however, we entered unfamiliar territory. Who knew what to expect from The President, an Austrian play from 1975, practically unknown in English-language theatre, that follows mouthy political leaders in the aftermath of an assassination attempt? The Gate’s inventive depiction of numbskulls in charge, and the people forced to listen to them, brought over the British-Australian actor Hugo Weaving to play the title role, and allowed Olwen Fouéré to give a masterclass in high camp as his first lady.
Over at the Abbey, much also felt different. Marina Carr’s absurdist Audrey or Sorrow, showing a crew of ghosts haunt a grieving couple starting a family, certainly wasn’t boring. Adapting a fin-de-siècle Russian family saga can be a superficial route to being regarded as auteurist, but Hilary Fannin’s audacious adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun didn’t shy from the playwright’s link to Soviet oppression. Elizabeth Kuti’s The Sugar Wife, a satire of wealthy philanthropists in 19th-century Dublin eyeing up abolitionists visiting from the United States, hadn’t been seen for two decades.
Ten years ago you wouldn’t have expected any of these to receive big-budget productions. Managements back then cited fiscal austerity and – with new writing long considered a box-office liability – a preference for staging classics. Five years ago programmers cautiously phased in shorter runs for new plays. Now there is greater confidence, and unfamiliar material is staged for longer. Some will perform better than others. At the Abbey, demand for Audrey or Sorrow was strong from the get-go, with an additional week’s performances announced before previews. Unfortunately, the belated Dublin premiere of Augusta Gregory’s complex relationship drama Grania, which she wrote in 1912, seemed to play to half-full rooms.
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Contemporary class
The standout plays of 2024 were contemporary. Róisín McBrinn’s magnificent staging of Circle Mirror Transformation, Annie Baker’s 2009 work about adrift New Englanders brought together by a community drama class, elicited some of the finest performances of the year: Marty Rea as a frustrated civilian, visibly stirred by classmates performing the story of his life; Niamh Cusack and Ristéard Cooper as a couple stealthily concealing the abuses of their marriage. It also seemed the most potent comment on the medium itself. “Do you ever wonder how many times your life is going to totally change and then start all over again?” a student asks long after class is over. Theatre, we know, can change lives, but rarely have we seen that portrayed.
Similarly meticulous in detail, and revelatory with alternative readings, was Reunion, Mark O’Rowe’s extraordinary mystery, in which a family come together to remember their dead father. Long moved on from the underworlds – criminal or supernatural – of Howie the Rookie and Terminus, O’Rowe took the Bergmanian set-up of couples’ shattering late-night confessions and deployed a Chekhovian artist stung by rejection and flirting with ideas of self-destruction. The overall effect was undoubtedly O’Rowe, however, written in remarkably constructed dialogue, woven with subtle power plays between family members, and leaving audiences satisfied to agonise over unconfirmed details (particularly a mother-daughter conflict portrayed with fascinating ambiguity by Cathy Belton and Valene Kane). Who needs a trip to the underworld? Plenty of horrors lurk in unexpected places here on the surface.
Looking to the future
O’Rowe and Baker’s plays both made a serious case for realism – easily pushed aside by broader, showier forms – as the most impressive mode of 2024, as if the closer we zoomed in, the more there was to unearth. The plot of Dee Roycroft’s excellent comeback play Amelia suggested that everything conceivable in our reality has already happened. Set in a later stage of the climate crisis, it takes an adynaton as its plot: a farmer and his teenage child take in a flying pig (nicknamed Amelia Earhart), as if everything once thought impossible has happened.
Roycroft’s play ached for acceptance of the unknown. The child – a neurodivergent teenager, seen as touchingly brave in Bláithin Mac Gabhann’s superb performance – yearned to see the world, to the worry of their overprotective father (John Cronin, doing his best work). And the play gently encouraged its audience to be courageous about a future that may have limited resources, as it cut off electricity to the auditorium and showed theatre reverting to the magic of a previous century, with a clanging thunder-sheet and a pedal-powered generator to build the stage lights towards brilliance. Amelia made the future feel like something to still have claim to.
What was left behind
The past, on the other hand, occasionally seemed put behind us. CoisCéim’s dance Palimpsest, a collision course with the first 100 years of the State, felt like the final product of the Decade of Centenaries, the government programme that has influenced theatre for the past 11 years. It also saw the choreographer David Bolger and the composer Denis Clohessy vigorously interrogate their past approaches, showing the island struggling – but, touchingly, also dancing – through a difficult century.
Elsewhere, the appointment of Selina Cartmell to Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre brought the director’s thrilling career in Ireland – from indie queen to head of the Gate – to an end, at least for now.
At the Abbey, a governance review, relating in part to the investigation of complaints about one of the theatre’s former co-directors, seemed to reach resolution after a costly two-year process. The national theatre committed to new governance structures, though questions around the complainants’ withdrawal from the process, and the board’s decision to issue redundancy payments to the outgoing co-directors when their fixed-term contracts ended, remain unanswered.
Thankfully, after a report that found its projections rather ambitious, there was little mention of Toy Show the Musical.
[ The Abbey’s €1m controversy: What went wrong?Opens in new window ]
A year celebrating women?
It should be said that, in addition to the several already mentioned, 2024 featured an abundance of plays written by women. The Ark presented Anna Carey’s ingenious adaptation of her novel The Making of Mollie, its bright young activists let loose on a grey, rigid version of presuffrage Ireland. Jody O’Neill’s stirring Grace saw a non-verbal girl with autism encouraged by the ghost of her father. Sophie Motley’s Winter Journey, a new version of Schubert’s Winterreise, was an existentialist promenade through a Cork neighbourhood. Louise Lowe adapted Seán O’Casey (Starjazzer) and James Joyce (The Dead).
Is this progress? The idea of an all-women’s season has been regarded with suspicion since the early days of Waking the Feminists. A third-wave feminist might point out that this wealth of playwrights were all white.
Industry anger becomes art
At this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival plenty of ire was aimed at the performing arts’ current discourse on inclusion. Most driven was Joy Nesbitt’s dark comedy Julius Caesar Variety Show, about a nightmarish actors’ audition. Nesbitt’s points felt new and insightful, as a black actor (a cool-headed Loré Adewusi) was seen dealing with a white bullying director (a compellingly snide Ultan Pringle) who insisted on the one hand that colour-blind casting doesn’t work, because audiences can’t unsee race, and on the other hand that not going along with exploitative expectations of blackness is actually being artistically conservative. How depressingly elaborate these schemes are.
How is inspiration supposed to flow in a country where nonwhite playwrights are only considered “early career” artists? There was a poignant moment during I’ve Always Liked the Name Marcus, Matthew Sharpe’s delightful play about a Jamaican-Northern Irish man’s upbringing. Sharpe’s character is on a soul-search, whirling through a series of reinventions – modelling himself on freestyle rappers and NBA players, looking more to the black public figures of the United States than anyone closer to home. “Who was my inspiration supposed to be?” he says, with ache, about a lack of representation.
At a time when programmers are taking plenty of risks, what if someone took a chance on trying to answer him?
