LOCKDOWN BUBBLES, TOIL AND TROUBLE
Yes, it was a ghastly year for the arts but rather than turn into a Shakespeare tragedy, talent saved the day
G‘It’s a case of new year, new faces and old problem’
abriel Byrne returns to The Gaiety (January 27–February 6, 2022) performing his adaptation of his memoir Walking With Ghosts, a Landmark Productions presentation about growing up among the fields and hills of his home on the outskirts of Dublin. It’s also a commentary on his time in Hollywood and on Broadway. There will be 12 performances, but none on Jan 31. Tickets from ticketmaster.ie €26. Additional booking fees may apply.
Walking With Ghosts brings an already exceptional year to a close for Landmark. Led by producer Anne Clarke, the company has chalked up an impressive 250 live performances of nine productions, 81 online performances, eight live broadcasts, six world premieres in five cities, and two international tours to at-home and live audiences, with live-streamed shows reaching audiences from Alaska to New Zealand. All done despite projects often having to be re-scheduled, dismantled and reassembled.
Elsewhere it’s a case of new year, new faces, old problem. Scottish artistic directors Graham McLaren and Neil Murray are gone from the Abbey, and Selina Cartmell leaves The Gate in a few months. And just when productions were warming up again, the Government knocks out 50% of theatre audience capacity.
I wouldn’t expect incoming Abbey directors Caitríona McLaughlin and Mark O’Brien to run into the trouble that hit McLaren and Murray in 2019 when a group of 300 actors directors and other theatre professionals complained to the Minister for the Arts about the Abbey schedules.
Too many co-productions with companies from the UK and elsewhere, they protested: fewer opportunities for local artists, and co-produced shows paying actors lower salaries.
The Abbey replied that attendances were the highest for a number of years, and in three years a deficit of €1.4m had been turned into a surplus, helped by the long run of the almost totally Canadian production Come From Away in 2018. Whatever about the professionals, audiences were obviously happy with the new regime.
Among other productions, McLaren and Murray launched major productions of On Raftery’s Hill, Ulysses and Jimmy’s Hall, the tense and gory Scandi noir, Let The Right One In (A Scottish National production). And the recent iGirl, produced a whopper of a one-woman performance from Olwen Fouéré.
The Abbey really stepped up to the mark in the streamed online work produced during the lockdowns, including the powerful monologues that made up the
‘Murderous threats, political chicanery and complicated love affairs’
two editions of Dear Ireland, the Mother and Baby Home scandals and 14 Voices From the Bloodied Field, about the Bloody Sunday killings in Croke Park,
And The Peacock certainly came alive during the last five years with a number of excellent plays that focused on Northern Ireland.
Selina Cartmell had barely time to get her feet under the table before The Gate was hit by the shutdowns, but her flare as an artistic and stage director were shown by The Great Gatsby that did away with auditorium seats and had the audience as partygoers at Gatsby’s house.
Assassins by Stephen Sondheim about killers and would-be killers of American presidents was a rare production, the one-woman Rape Of Lucrece by Shakespeare (a towering performance by Camille O’Sullivan) was even rarer, and the end-of-year shows The Red Shoes, and a re-imagined Dickens’s Christmas Carol were particular delights.
This year’s production is the children’s Mabel’s Magnificent Flying Machine. MiddleTown by Mikel Murfi toured nationally, and the twohander Visiting Hour was a moving reflection on dementia. In general, Cartmell changed the image of The Gate with a series of Irish and modern works that made the theatre less predictable.
Irish National Opera hits the ground running in 2022 with a tour of Bajazet by Vivaldi, that opens in Navan January 15, and tours to six Irish towns before playing in London (February 4–12). It has murderous threats, political chicanery and complicated love affairs.
The lockdowns brought out the inventive best in INO during the past two years, including the extraordinary digital wizardry of the online Mozart’s Seraglio, recorded separately by individual singers and instrumentalists in their own homes, connected to the conductor only by their mobiles.
The 20 Shots of Opera by 20 composers, was justifiably claimed by INO as the biggest single project in Irish operatic history.
This year, among other online work, they brought The Bord Gáis Theatre back to life with a smashing online concert version of La Bohème, and Alice’s Adventures Under Ground by Gerald Barry was a lively adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic.