The year 2023 has been a satisfyingly varied one across Northern Ireland’s vibrant performing arts sector.
We have been treated to a raft of outstanding home-grown productions and events, including the keenly-anticipated return of one of Northern Ireland’s leading playwrights; a finely judged revival of one of Martin McDonagh’s early plays; a visit to Belfast by one of Ireland’s top theatre companies; a sweet, cameo piece for families; a fearlessly cathartic one-man show; a sparky piece of Gothic noir; a stylish restaging of absurdist theatre; an intelligent, multi-layered Christmas show … to list but a few.
After an absence of several years, Owen McCafferty returned to Belfast’s Lyric Theatre with Agreement, his play about the negotiations surrounding the Good Friday Agreement, 25 years previously. Commissioned by MGC (Michael Grandage Company) in the West End, this intense ensemble piece was subsequently premiered by the Lyric and was the highlight of what proved to be a hugely successful year for that theatre. This was no verbatim docudrama, but a theatrically daring imagining of the wheeling and dealing, the ducking and diving among party leaders, prime ministers and high-profile American mediators (including President Bill Clinton) in a complex political dance, which inched its way to an acceptable compromise and the prospect of a hard-won peace. It will return to the Lyric in March, before transferring to the Irish Arts Centre in New York.
Working against pitifully low funding, the independent sector, yet again, punched above its weight. Big Telly triumphantly returned home from New York, after an award-winning run of Frankenstein’s Monster is Drunk and the Sheep Have All Jumped the Fences. As the zany title suggests, director Zoë Seaton focuses the full battery of her restless imagination and inventiveness onto a heady mix of Gothic horror and Hollywood glamour, tinged with a dark edge of so-called domestic bliss.
Cahoots unveiled When We Were Wild, a warm-hearted piece about the joys and perils of life in the countryside. Ruairi Conaghan and John-Paul Connolly play ageing farmer brothers, whose animal neighbours are portrayed by Helen Foan’s lifelike puppets, accompanied by Kyron Bourke’s moody music.
Conaghan resurfaced in Lies Where It Falls, a cathartic solo show, connecting his roles as an IRA terrorist and the Player King in a landmark London production of Hamlet, with the sectarian murder of a close family member during the early days of the Troubles. In unravelling his creative and personal immersion in the two roles, he reveals the traumatic memories that were sparked, the toll they took on his mental health and the knock-on effects upon his family.
Prime Cut Productions teamed with the Lyric to co-produce a revival of Martin McDonagh’s troubling, early play The Beauty Queen of Leenane. It was a joy to witness Ger Ryan’s long overdue return to the Belfast stage, alongside Nicky Harley’s despairing performance. The two are locked into a mutually destructive mother-daughter relationship, in which the blurred lines between love, duty and hatred are cruelly linked. In director Emma Jordan and designer Ciaran Bagnall’s integrated vision, the pair are, literally, embedded in an unchanging, primaeval landscape and psychological imprisonment inside their neglected, isolated cottage in the west of Ireland.
Galway’s Druid Theatre Company chose the Lyric Theatre as a venue for its three-in-a-day touring production of Seàn O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy, thereby enabling Northern audiences to appreciate these mighty plays, which were written in times of rebellion and civil conflict. Under the umbrella title of DruidO’Casey, the large ensemble cast committed heart and soul to a colourful gallery of roles, under the towering theatrical vision of UK Theatre Awards-winning director Garry Hynes. Performed chronologically, The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock paint a portrait of the effects of seismic social change on Dublin’s poverty stricken underclass.
Its production of The Shadow of a Gunman, featuring Marty Breen and Rory Nolan, was widely agreed to have been the best we have seen in our lifetime. It is scheduled to be revived for a tour in Ireland in the spring of 2024.
Tinderbox artistic director Patrick J O’Reilly wrote, envisaged and directed a stunning new version of Rhinoceros, Eugene Ionesco’s dramatic response to the horrors inflicted on Europe by 1930s fascism. Retitled Rhino, O’Reilly sets this surreal allegory within the outwardly cosy environment of a provincial French town, whose citizens are automaton-like characters, controlled by outside forces in a video game. One by one, they morph into mindless, grotesque killer beasts. The one person who refuses to follow the rampaging herd is left behind, friendless, frightened and alone.
Christmas shows have come and gone, in a variety of shapes, sizes and quality. One stands out. The Night Before Christmas at the MAC is a shining example of how festive fair can be intelligent, coherent, colourful, funny and entertaining for audiences of all ages. Like the Lyric’s new version of Hansel and Gretel, it is set in an old-fashioned library, whose creaking shelves provide safe havens, refuges for the imagination and avenues for new journeys of discovery.
Allison Harding’s charismatic storyteller Noelle does battle with Seán Kearns’ authoritarian, science-obsessed commissioner, who orders all books to be burned and all creative endeavours crushed. Stepping out of the pages to rescue the situation come an adorable carnival of animals, fairytale characters and familiar friends, not least a strutting trio of pink piglets, who steal the hearts of all present.
Here’s to another bumper bundle from our talented, underfunded but highly committed theatre industry in the year ahead. Cheers, all!
The Even Hand 