Arts 2012
ANYONE who works in the arts will be aware of how greatly the sector relies on volunteers. These are the unsung heroes who man the phone lines and ticket desks, steward events and marshal support for projects. Salaried jobs in the arts are few and far between, and those who attain them are almost invariably those who have worked their way up the ranks.
One could almost hear the collective groan when Arts Minister Jimmy Deenihan (right) proposed that the arts sector should reach out to philanthropists for funding in 2013 and beyond. The feeling among arts organisations is that they have enough to be doing surviving on micro-budgets without now being expected to pass the hat around among an unidentified breed of benefactors.
Minister Deenihan’s idea is not without merit, of course. The Ireland Funds have raised millions of euros outside the State for Irish cultural projects, while initiatives such as Fundit.ie have allowed arts lovers of modest means to contribute to pet projects.
Any source of funding for the arts is worth exploring, but there was little evidence of cultural philanthropism catching on in this country even in the boom years, and one wonders if it can now realistically be promoted in a recession.
More worryingly, the minister’s proposal signalled that the arts sector can expect further cuts in State funding next year and beyond. This will inevitably lead to further job losses in the most creative area of the economy.
As it is, the arts will depend on voluntarism more than ever in 2013. It seems unfair that the sector should also be expected to source a greater share of its funding than it already generates itself. There’s only so much can be left to the imagination.
— Marc O’Sullivan, Arts Editor
Are Meath people the funniest in Ireland? The county certainly produces an inordinate amount of comedy talents. This year, three of its comedians — Dylan Moran, his schoolmate Tommy Tiernan and the BAFTA-award winning writer, Sharon Horgan — penned comedy shorts for the prestigious Sky Little Crackers season.
Tiernan cast Irish acting legend Marie Mullen as his mother in his autobiographical story while Horgan, of course, had already acted in Chris O’Dowd’s Little Crackers two years ago.
O’Dowd’s star continues to rise in British comedy circles, a fact marked by his tribe last month with the announcement he was to be granted the freedom of Roscommon, an accolade he acknowledged with the tweet: “not sure what it entails but I’m presuming maidens are involved”.
On the live comedy circuit, the short tours of Frankie Boyle and the incomparable Stewart Lee were highlights, while on the festival front, the Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny marked its 18th birthday; the July comedy jamboree at the Iveagh Gardens was another hit while the wonderful Clonmel Comedy Festival is becoming the pick of the Irish comedy festivals.
Its stand-out shows included Foil, Arms and Hog; The Rubberbandits and upper-crust Simon Evans (never slow to deride the poor breeding of his audience) as the pick of its international acts.
On the box, The Savage Eye, the most refreshing and dangerously funny comedy to come out of RTÉ’s studios since Scrap Saturday, rolled out its third season earlier in the year while there were few funnier moments than Adele King’s startling turn during the Late Late Show’s jubilee bash. “I feel another ‘zip up your mickey’ coming on, David,” she said to her ex-husband who looked on from the wings, presumably almost as nervous as host Ryan Tubridy, one of the few sober people left in the Montrose studio at that stage.
— Richard Fitzpatrick
For the second year in a row, Corcadorca took to the stage of the Cork Opera House to perform Shakespeare in October with a beguiling production of Romeo and Juliet.
Proving as adept at staging the Bard in the city’s largest theatre as it has done on the streets of Cork, the company presented the tragic tale of the star-crossed lovers in a pared-back fashion with a minimalist set, starring Jay Duffy and Aisling Franciosi as the young leads. Aesthetically, the production was pleasing, with a nod to West Side Story.
Niamh Linehan’s searing performance as the heart-broken Lady Capulet was the most memorable.
As part of the Cork Midsummer Festival, Playgroup presented Berlin Love Tour which, despite its peculiar premise, worked really well.
This guided tour of Berlin, imagined by walking the streets of Cork led by Hilary O’Shaughnessy, was moving, as her character reflected on ways of honouring the victims of the Holocaust. The character, an informative tour guide, disclosed the disintegration of her love affair with a German man while living in Berlin. This unusual piece of theatre was the perfect blend of the personal combined with the wider and hugely dramatic story of Berlin. Jack Healy revelled in the earthy and lyrical language of Patrick Kavanagh’s epic poem, The Great Hunger, directed by Ger Fitzgibbon at the Granary Theatre in May.
Healy put in a fine performance as the protagonist, a bachelor farmer called Patrick Maguire, who is spiritually and sexually starved.
Conor Lovett of Gare St Lazare Players performed two solo pieces by Samuel Beckett at the Cork Opera House in March. First Love and The End were in capable hands, confirming that Lovett is a fine interpreter of Beckett. Despite the expanse of the Cork Opera House Stage, Lovett masterfully commanded the space.
— Colette Sheridan
Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did was undoubtedly the most memorable Irish film of 2012. Abraham is best known for his 2007 film, Adam and Paul, which followed two heroin addicts around Dublin as they attempted to score.
What Richard Did is also set in Dublin, but in a milieu of wealth and privilege. It revolves around a fatal act of violence committed by Richard Karlsten, a schoolboy and rugby star whose friends and father collude in the subsequent cover-up. Abrahamson’s direction is as masterful as it is understated, and Jack Reynor is mesmerising as Richard.
Reynor turns up again in Kirsten Sheridan’s Dollhouse, her best film to date. Shot entirely at her parents’ home in Dublin, the drama follows the interactions of a group of young people over the course of a night. The dialogue was largely improvised by the teenage cast, many of whom were making their first film appearance.
Ian Fitzgibbon’s Death of a Superhero features Thomas Sangster as a young cancer victim whose imagination is given full vent in a series of animated sequences based on his drawings. The film is poignant and funny, without ever giving in unduly to sentimentality, and memorably treats its teenage subjects as intelligent human beings.
Ireland may well have produced its first decent monster movie in the shape of Grabbers. Written by Kevin Lehane and directed by Jon Wright, the film stars Richard Coyle and Ruth Bradley as a pair of mismatched gardaí who battle an invasion of tentacled sea creatures on a storm-bound island off the Irish coast. If that sounds improbable, so too was the film’s success at the box office.
Martin McDonagh’s first Hollywood outing, Seven Psychopaths, made good on the promise of his debut feature, In Bruges. Colin Farrell again plays the starring role, as a screenwriter struggling with his latest project, but McDonagh has also roped in Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken and Tom Waits to help make up the murderous motley crew of the film’s title. The film is gloriously indifferent to political correctness, and is by far the funniest thing to come out of Hollywood this year.
— Marc O’Sullivan
The Sacred Modernist in Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, looked at the life’s work of Josef Albers (1888 – 1976). This powerful and contemplative exhibition included a specially commissioned reconstruction of his stained glass window Rosa mystica ora pro nobis, (right), destroyed in the Second World War.
The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin staged Becoming, Alice Maher’s mid-career retrospective at their Earlsfort Terrace galleries. This was spectacular and intriguing.
Seán Keating (1889-1977) had two major comprehensive exhibitions, both curated by Dr Éimear O’Connor. Contemporary Contexts in the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork saw his work contextualised by the work of other Irish artists, and the extensive ESB collection of Keating works was showcased at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin in ESB: Enlightenment and Legacy.
EVA Limerick curator Annie Fletcher resurrected the 1994 piece Construction X by Luc Deleu. This enormous sculpture was made up of nine shipping containers, which had a powerful impact on the urban landscape.
Bringloid V Colony by Carl Giffney at The Black Mariah, Cork, was a retro, sci-fi installation of Star Trek VHS tapes reworked into a conveyor belt mounted on a wooden scaffold with rock debris. This fascinating piece riffed on Episode 44 of The Next Generation series involving a community of Irish people called The Bringloidí, from the Irish word for dream.
Female Artists of the 20th Century at Galway City Museum, curated by Emer McGarry, featured moving and important work by leading Irish female artists.
At Visual in Carlow, Brian Duggan reconstructed the barn from the cult film Heaven’s Gate in his installation Everything can be done, in principle. A great community experience, where the viewer was invited to roller-skate and play pool.
— Tina O’Sullivan
The year’s big theatre event was DruidMurphy, the revival of three Tom Murphy classics by Galway company Druid.
Garry Hynes’s reappraisal of Famine, Conversations on a Homecoming, and A Whistle in the Dark had guts and gristle, but plumbed the vast lyrical depths of Murphy’s vision too. No less impressive was the Abbey’s revival of Murphy’s The House. Featuring stalwart performances, it elegantly rendered Murphy’s great tragedy about the torturous workings of desire.
The prominence of Murphy’s work in 2012 exposed the dearth of new Irish literary drama.
Fortunately, the more contemporary theatre forms threw up some fine work. ANU’s The Boys of Foley Street was particularly impressive.
An intense and riveting slice of immersive theatre, it revisited the darkness of 1970s inner-city Dublin to great effect.
By contrast, in Farm, Willfredd theatre company served up a warmer, more hopeful paean to the values of agricultural life.
RADE’s The Last Ten Years was another high point. A startling work staged in the evocative surroundings of St Patrick’s Cathedral, it delivered a piercing critique of prescription drug culture and the capitalist drive behind it.
Meanwhile, near St Patrick’s Cathedral, in Marsh’s library, The Performance Corporation staged a brilliant site-specific piece inspired by Bram Stoker’s The Judge’s House.
The standout international show this year was Mystery Magnet by Belgian visual artist Miet Warlop.
Its sinister cartoon-punk aesthetic was a visual masterpiece.
Another show with a wonderful visual sense was electro musical Alice in Funderland, which – though hamstrung in places – fairly shook up the Abbey stage.
Finally, Blue Raincoat turned out an inspired adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth, while O’Brien was very much to the fore, too, in Rough Magic’s hilarious revival of Improbable Frequency.
Pádraic Killeen
The year in live music kicked off in earnest in February when buzz band of the hour Django Django blew the figurative roof off a sell-out Grand Social in Dublin. A sort of twitchier, over-caffeinated Beta Band, the Scottish four-piece (with a Derry frontman) specialised in ferociously smart indie-dance. Anyone who caught their first major Irish show cannot have been surprised that they would go on to receive a Mercury Music Prize nomination.
No less clamorous, albeit on a far larger scale, was Florence and the Machine’s debut arena concert, which took place at the O2, Dublin in March.
Framed by a glittering art-deco set, Florence Welch, pouted, preened and took one of her trademark stage dives. You were, it was clear, witnessing the arrival of a star. In June, meanwhile, there was only one gig in town – the tingle-inducing pairing of Kanye West and Jay Z, again at the O2.
Watching the two biggest gobs in hip-hop trade rhymes atop a pair of gleaming towers was an experience nobody – though what you really took away was Jay Z’s storm force charisma and transcendental flow. Several weeks later, the first major festival of the year, Forbidden Fruit at Dublin’s Royal Hospital Kilmainham, witnessed the coming of age of local dance act Le Galaxie, whose music suggested a hot-blooded 21st century updating of Kraftwerk (though you can’t imagine the stern Germans performing, as Le Galaxie did, in scary latex masks in the likeness of former American presidents).
In West Cork, nostalgia was flowing over as ’90s guitar godhead Bob Mould reprised his landmark Copper Blue album (originally by his band Sugar) in its entirety at August’s Liss Ard festival – though there is a case that the event truly belonged to Oregon dance-pop outfit Chromatics.
Other highlights of the year included Jack White at the O2, The Stone Roses at Phoenix Park (Ian Brown’s foghorn vocals notwithstanding), electro singer Grimes at Electric Picnic, Magnetic Fields at Cork Opera House and, as Christmas loomed, dance minimalists xx at The Olympia. They’re back in June for an O2 date – proof that, while 2012 was a great year for gigs, there is every possibility 2013 will be better yet.
— Ed Power
The music in the 57 concerts, recitals, and operas I heard this year ranged from the earliest opera still in the repertory (Opera Theatre Company’s production of Monteverdi’s 1607 Orfeo in the Theatre Royal, Waterford) to Penderecki’s 2008 Quartet No 3, played by Apollon Musagéte at the unforgettable West Cork Chamber Music Festival.
The Met Live presentations at the Omniplex enthralled, but my favourite operatic memory of the year was Pagliacci at Everyman Palace.
Highlights of this year’s Choral Festival were Mozart’s Requiem in the opening concert, the National Chamber Choir in St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, and the Czech Gentlemen Singers in the North Cathedral.
I have fond memories of Rachel Podger’s Brecon Ensemble playing Bach and Peter Whelan’s Ensemble Marsyas playing Zelenka (at East Cork Early Music Festival) and the Irish Baroque Orchestra playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations’ in the Grainstore, Ballymaloe.
The Irish Chamber Orchestra concerts at UL Concert Hall, Limerick, have particularly thrilled me, especially their February concert featuring John Kinsella’s 10th Symphony and Beethoven’s 4th; also their September performance of Bartok’s Divertimento.
The National Youth Orchestra of Ireland’s July performance of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony was similarly memorable.
Robin Tritschler performing Schubert with Simon Lepper and Cara O’Sullivan singing music by Hahn, Ravel, and Rodrigo with Eleanor Malone gave great pleasure, as did Catherine Leonard and Hugh Tinney playing Ravel. Rachmaninov, played by cellist, Brian O’Kane and Min Jung at the Crawford Gallery was magnificent, as was Kennedy’s performance of Brahms’ Violin Concerto with CCSO. Brahms’ String Quintet in G, though, played by the Vanbrugh Quartet, in Bantry with Lawrence Power and, more recently, in Cork with Nobuko Imai (viola), provided my most moving, unforgettable experiences.
— Declan Townsend
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