Shane Hegarty talks to a range of people about their cultural and entertainment highlights of the past year.
Olive Braiden
One of the most notable events for me was the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics in Croke Park. It was the most fantastic thing and I was bowled over by the astounding creativity. It really was an unexpected highlight. I did my M. Phil last year and I did all my reading around that because I was terrified to pick up anything else. I read Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume One, 1884-1933, which is a terrific book showing how human rights start with little things. But I also read Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton and while I'm a great admirer of hers, this was a very disappointing read. She has, though, had an interesting life and it's interesting to contrast the two women. On television, I saw Chavez: Inside The Coup out of the blue one evening. I was supposed to go out, but I couldn't leave the house. I am currently reading The Shooting Gallery by Yuko Tsushima and Japanese writers are fast becoming firm favourites.
On a personal note, meeting Nelson Mandela, well, shaking hands with him in a line-up in Galway. He was getting an award from Galway University and he made a wonderful speech saying how countries were afraid to take on the US, and to see him lecturing these politicians who had their heads bowed, was great. In music, my concert of the year was Cecilia Bartoli in the NCH. It was outstanding, she bears comparison even with Marias Callas, and it was a great music event. The Brehon Law School was fascinating. Its theme this year was the outsider, with speakers from other countries, and people waiting for asylum. I took time off during the Dublin Writers' Festival and went to a load of things. It was a fabulous time, with always something on all over Dublin. Just to hear writers reading their own stuff, such as Zadie Smith and Andrew O'Hagan, I couldn't wait to get their books.
Olive Braiden is chairperson of the Arts Council
Paul Noonan
The Flaming Lips at Witnness gave a masterclass in winning over a crowd . . . Wayne Coyne for president! They were taking the place of an injured White Stripes on the main stage, so many people wouldn't have known who they were. They came on in white and red, opened with a cover of Red Nation Army, played a wonderful Thank You Jack White for the Fibre-Optic Jesus That You Gave Me . . ., and finished with Do You Realise. None more warm and fuzzy.
There were some great pop singles. I met a lad in the Gravediggers pub in Dublin who confided to me that he thought that the man to continue the full-blooded legacy of one of that pub's former patrons, Donal McCann, and Harris, O'Toole and co was one Mr Justin Timberlake. I don't know. But he did make daytime radio a lot more bearable, as did Beyoncé's Crazy In Love and Outkast's Hey Ya. "Lend me some sugar, I AM your neighbour!" Line of the year.
Paul Noonan is lead singer of Bell X1
Mary Finan
The Hours was my favourite movie of the year. The direction was excellent as were the three central performances. Nicole Kidman was unforgettable as Virginia Woolf. I went twice and will probably see it again.
Another highlight was the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, in May. I always go to at least one festival a year and have gone there for the last two years. It is a thoroughly enjoyable event of music and theatre by the sea. I was motivated to go there because the Gate's Pride and Prejudice was one of the main productions on the programme. It was a huge success. There are two other plays that linger in my mind. Arthur Miller's All My Sons at the Abbey was a great evening's theatre. Under Joe Dowling's direction the play had a new freshness and vitality and the set was one of the best I have ever seen anywhere. The other was Mark O'Rowe's Crestfall at the Gate. I loved the language and remember my husband saying that it seemed to be influenced by rap music. It had that sort of rhythm and excitement. It was directed by Garry Hynes, who is doing brilliant work. My favourite production at the Dublin Theatre Festival was her Sharon's Grave. She is injecting new life into Keane's plays for a modern audience.
Turning to music, I had a memorable evening of opera in Cap Ferrat in the south of France. Imagine the music of Rigoletto filling an elegant Palladian villa on a balmy sunny evening. It was magical. For my favourite concert I am torn between Cecilia Bartoli or the 21-year-old pianist Lang Lang, both at the NCH but I have to choose the latter if only for the Chopin Nocturne which he played sublimely. I was also pleased to have another opportunity to hear Suzanne Murphy's beautiful voice at the Opera Ireland concert at the Gaiety in November. It never fails to soothe and move me. As the year draws to a close, I am lost in Claire Boylan's delightful Emma Brown.
Mary Finan is chairperson of Wilson Hartnell PR and of The Gate Theatre board
Gerry Godley
Cultural overload continued unabated in 2003, and more than once I wanted to meekly raise a hand to say, stop, my brain is full. It makes the work that stays with you all the more resonant. The arcane world of dance continues to fascinate, and like others lucky enough to see it, I felt Michael Keegan- Dolan's Giselle was a high-water mark, the emotional sum infinitely greater than its imaginatively crafted parts. More modestly, Julie Lockett's witty vignette, Something Old, Somewhere New, Somewhere Borrowed, Something Blue, part of the Revolutions programme of new choreography at the Fringe, was evidence that dance is in rude health.
Hats off to Opera Ireland and Fergus Linehan at DTF, who earned his keep as artistic director by bringing the risky production of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Belgium's Het Muzik Lod & Ro to Roddy Doyle's heartland. With the hippest of scores by Chris De Foort and its full-on deployment of state-of-the-art visual mixing, it reconciled the work's dark pathos with a genuine commitment to that chimera of the arts called "innovation". Yes, but was it opera? Who cares.
Ear fatigue is an occupational hazard, and among the 2003 jazz albums that survived this promoter's adherence to "the two-tune rule" were Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi's Fellini Jazz (CamJazz), arrangements for jazz quintet of the evocative music of Nino Rota et al, elegant and cinematic in themselves. In the US, guitarist Bill Frisell has finally capitulated to his inner country musician, and the sleepy indolence of The Intercontinentals (Nonesuch) made you long for a stoop to sit on. In a year that saw world music cast its net ever wider, Uzbekhistan's Sevara Nezarkhan, Brazil's Daude and Finland's Ulla Pirtijaarvi all made strong, contemporary débuts that debunked the notion that the genre is all about 1950s Cadillacs and adobe huts.
Gerry Godley is director of Improvised Music Company
Tommy Tiernan
Rather than the whole of things I suppose it was snippets that struck me. Bits of this, bits of that. Être Et Avoir was a great movie but I think the cinema magic moment for me was Jack Nicholson sitting on the roof of his mobile home in About Schmidt, staring at the stars with a blanket wrapped round his shoulders. He was stepping outside the norm of his life into something unfamiliar and lovely. Music-wise, it would be hearing a solo Sonny Rollins CD and finding a female hippity-hoppity star that I like (Alicia Keys). Sinead O'Connor's CD also made me cry. A holy voice is what she has.
In booktown, getting a copy of an Apollinaire poem translated and signed by Samuel Beckett stunned me. It is one of a limited edition and his scrawly signature is written in the corner of the first page. I've never been so affected by anything like that before.
Tommy Tiernan is a comedian
Myles Dungan
My highlights tend to be more representative of Ireland than of the wider world. Nature of the job, I suppose.
The gig of the year has to have been Macca at the RDS. Too young to have seen them in their performing days it was a joy to watch 25 per cent of the Beatles going through almost 50 per cent of their classic output. That, the Special Olympics opening ceremony and the Dublin Theatre Festival-imported production of Hamlet were the live performance highlights.
Musically, the Undertones showed how it should be done. Their greatest-hits CD highlighted their awesome back-catalogue (which includes the greatest pop song ever recorded, Teenage Kicks), while the new album, Get What You Need, demonstrates that John O'Neill hasn't lost his talent for squeezing out a murderous hook. Fergal who? The Thrills managed half of a superb album while Bell X1 conjured up the other half, though I wouldn't recommend fusing them. Internationally, the Strokes's "impossible second album", Room on Fire, turned out to be rather good really, while the re-release of the back-catalogue of the other Liverpool fab four, Echo and the Bunnymen, transported at least one listener back to his 20s.
I would highlight three Irish books: Colum McCann's breathtaking Dancer, which both imagines and recreates the life of Rudolf Nureyev; Paul Murray's astonishing début, An Evening of Long Goodbyes (it's actually the name of a greyhound); and my colleague and fellow Gooner (don't ask) John Kelly's piece of late 1970s musical nostalgia, Sophisticated Boom Boom. Other than that, Monica Ali's Brick Lane wins the White Teeth Book of the Year Award and honorary Irishman D.B.C. Pierre's Vernon God Little walks away with the Leitrim Book of the Year Award in the absence of anything from John McGahern (or playwright Michael Harding).
Best Irish film of the year was Intermission, though Goldfish Memory ran it close. Catch Me If You Can was an excellent piece of whimsy. Adaptation was a bizarre piece of whimsy. Spellbound was a spellbinding documentary and for anyone with an interest in mountains Touching the Void was an astounding piece of work and one of the highlights of the IFI Stranger Than Fiction festival.
Myles Dungan presents Rattlebag on RTÉ Radio One and is author of The Stealing of the Irish Crown Jewels
Catriona Crowe
In movies, The Leopard, Luchino Visconti's wonderful 1963 adaptation of Giuseppe Di Lampedusa's novel about change and survival in mid-19th-century Sicily: "Everything must change so that everything can remain the same." One of the great actors, Burt Lancaster, in one of his greatest roles. A privilege to see it again on a big screen, courtesy of the IFC.
Intacto, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo; first film by a young director from the Canary Islands, starring Max Von Sydow as a gambler in personal luck, which can be accumulated by surviving disaster. An interesting take on human currencies, set in the Canaries, which look nothing like their stereotyped holiday resort image.
In theatre, The Drunkard, Tom Murphy's radical re-working of a mid-19th-century American temperance melodrama. This is almost an entirely new play, paying affectionate homage to the powerful emotional tropes of melodrama, and injecting them with a sensibility which allows the audience to empathise with the characters while maintaining a distance from bathos. Splendid acting from the B*spoke Theatre Company, particularly Stephen Brennan as the villain, a fabulous Law Library caricature.
Sharon's Grave was the latest in Garry Hynes's superlative recuperation of the works of John B. Keane. One of Keane's strangest plays, with its subtext of savage pagan forces underlying strictly regimented rural life. As usual, perfectly cast, with Frankie McCafferty amazing as Dinzie Conlee, a once-in-a-lifetime part. Hynes is revealing Keane to be among the most unsentimental of Irish playwrights.
On television, Strumpet City, RTÉ's digitally remastered version of the 1980s series based on James Plunkett's novel about the 1913 lockout. Another reminder of what terrific acting talent we have in Ireland. Vincent McCabe, David Kelly and the late Donal McCann are especially striking in a wonderful cast.
In books, W.B. Yeats, A Life: Vol. II, The Arch-Poet, by R.F. Foster, the second and last volume of Foster's definitive biography of Yeats, a project which took 17 years, and more than justifies the effort. Packed with scholarship, insight, humour and judicious analysis, the book gives us an intimate view of the last 20 years of Yeats's extraordinary life, and is as entertaining to read as it is instructive.
Catriona Crowe is an archivist and critic
Gerry Smyth
Kapka Kassabova, a young Bulgarian émigré poet who writes in English, gave a memorable reading of her work at the Cúirt festival in Galway last May. Her collection, Someone Else's Life (Bloodaxe), is a book of striking originality in which the poet speaks for those who have been uprooted or dispossessed by, mostly European, history. Sometime elliptical but always evocative, Kasabova memorialises lives in transit.
Barrie Cooke, in his major retrospective exhibition in the RHA in October, proved again how out of touch are those critics who proclaim the death of painting. Magnificent large, and smaller-scale, canvasses depicting the elemental world to which he often brings a lyric sensibility. This assemblage of so many of his works in one space demonstrated his importance and place in the history of Irish contemporary art.
Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark provided a unique cinema experience. A combination of the epic and elegiac, it celebrates Russia's imperial past and place in European culture. Composed in a sequence of vignettes, the director's masterstroke was the use of one single shot for the entire film as the camera journeyed through the splendours of St Petersburgh's Hermitage Museum. One of the real masterpieces of the past year in cinema.
American novelist John Wilson first published his novel Stoner in 1964 but this excellent, and often melancholy, mediation was reissued this year with a forward by John McGahern. There may be a gentle note to the beautifully lucid and precise prose, but it carries within it powerful convictions about the necessity of holding on to true values and keeping faith with what we believe to be our true identities.
Robert Lepage provided one of the outstanding theatrical experiences of the year with The Far Side of the Moon, which he wrote and directed. Part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, it was a wondrous feat of the imagination and the technical possibilities of modern stagecraft, with a highly energetic performance by Yves Jacques.
And, finally, Paul McCartney's RDS concert in May was a thrilling reminder of his songwriting genius and also a thrilling night out for those of us still under curfew when the Beatles performed here in 1964.
Gerry Smyth is acting arts editor of The Irish Times
Hector Ó hEochagáin
In music: Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf and Damien Dempsey's album Seize The Day, I know all the words! Also The Darkness and the Kings of Leon. Films, Intermission and The Lord of the Rings.
Best TV was the new series of Phoenix Nights, Last Orders and Network 2's The Panel, and on radio any good old bitchy argument on Joe Duffy. Anything else? Amú, of course, hanging with Hef in the Playboy mansion, stripping with the Chippendales, and of course, Traverse, my nag, winning two races on the trot! In books, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw by Eric Bowden and Eric Schlosser's Reefer Nation.
Hector Ó hEochagáin presents Amú on TG4
Ciaran Benson
It was an eclectic year for me. The Treasure Island-indebted boy in me immensely enjoyed Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean and Peter Weir's Master and Commander. In theatre, continuing the nautical theme, I especially enjoyed Blue Raincoat's The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst (The Peacock) and Readco's The Other Side (The Project). It was a good year for the visual arts in Ireland. Its "senior" artists had energetic showings. Just before he died, Tony O'Malley had a wonderful show of works on paper in the Taylor Gallery. Louis le Brocquy showed to continued acclaim and Barrie Cooke had a marvellous retrospective in the RHA-Gallagher Gallery. Many younger artists showed memorably. If I had to choose, and it feels invidious to do so when so many deserve mention, then the images from Cecily Brennan's small show Heat remain in my memory as transfigurations of what is normally taken to be disfiguration. Hughie O'Donoghue's Baia show and Blaise Drummond's What to Look for in Summer (both in the Rubicon Gallery), and Nick Miller's Figure to Ground (RHA-Gallagher) can stand for the diversity that is contemporary figurative work. Despite my disappointment in its lack of reflective uniformity, the act and fact of the erection of Ian Richie's Spire in O'Connell Street has to be a literal highlight (further helped when its lights work!) of 2003. I particularly enjoyed works from two quite different masters of the guitar in jazz: Pat Metheny's One Quiet Night (Warner 2003) and the English bass player Mo Foster's Time to Think (Primrose Hill Records, 2002). Finally, I admired the insights and synthetic power of A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2002) by the Canadian psychologist Merlin Donald.
Ciaran Benson is a professor of psychology at UCD
Fiach Mac Conghail
On TV, Chavez: Inside The Coup was absolutely amazing. Also Michael Parkinson's interview with George Best and David Beckham was great. Parkinson asked Best how close to a match Best would have sex and Best told him "half-time". Beckham blushed at that. On radio, Myles Dungan's public interview with Maeve Binchy was a brilliant piece of radio. It almost felt like being there with them in the NCH. In theatre, Robert Lepage's Far Side of the Moon at the O'Reilly Theatre was an amazing piece and the absolute highlight of the year for me. In books, Tom Humphries's Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo and his article on camogie. Also, Antoinette Quinn's biography of Patrick Kavanagh and the recent collection of poetry by Bernard O'Donoghue, Outliving. In music, The Frames' live recording, Setlist, and David Kitt were highlights. And David Bowie's gig was the best of the year. An amazing two and a half hours of him belting along.
Fiach MacConghail is an independent producer and adviser to the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism