What a year: Joe Duffy, Kevin Barry and others pick their cultural highlights
Joe Duffy, Kevin Barry and Stephanie Preissner re among those sharing their 2023 highlights
I loved Flora and Son with Eve Hewson and Jack Raynor. Eve Hewson is a revelation. The director John Carney makes Dublin look fantastic in it. A great movie.
I’ve just discovered Cian Ducrot from Cork. He is intelligent, mesmeric, melodic, meaningful. He’s playing his first big, open-air gig in Dublin’s St Anne’s Park – beside where I live – next year. If I’ve anything to do with it, it will be sold out.
Aonghus McAnally doing Christy Hennessy was the best gig I’ve been to in a long time. It wasn’t a tribute, it was a piece of art that stands in its own right woven around Christy’s songs and stories with a seven-piece band. He did it so effortlessly.
Druid Theatre’s production of Seán O’Casey’s great trilogy was the most brilliant piece of theatre this year. It was magic. Incredible ambition, doing the three plays in one day some days.
Martin Doyle’s Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place is probably the most moving and accessible book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland I’ve ever read. He documents every killing, 27, in the parish he grew up in. He navigates it brilliantly. There’s no anger. It’s observation. He humanises every person in it, showing up the futility of violence. Bullets, and their repercussions, never stop traveling in time.
The Van Gogh Dublin Exhibition: The Immersive Experience in Artane behind the site of the Stardust tragedy was incredible. I was blown away by it. It was the story of Van Gogh – the colours, paintings, clouds, sunflowers, wheatfields, revolving around you – in a converted warehouse. It was multi-dimensional – the walls, ceiling, floor. Kids loved it. It was mesmeric.
I love Billions. It’s fun and has a Shakespearean level of revenge in the plot. Think Succession but with characters you might actually like.
Cillian Murphy is going to win all the awards for Oppenheimer but I was sitting beside Keith Barry when I saw the film so there’s a good chance I only think I’ve seen Oppenheimer.
The TV recording of Live at Apollo. Yes I’m picking my own gig.
A production of The Lehman Trilogy at London’s Gillian Lynne Theatre, a spectacular retelling of a financial rise and fall.
The Amusements By Aingeala Flannery is a funny, razor sharp depiction of small-town Ireland.
- Neil Delamere’s new show Neil By Mouth visits The Everyman, Cork (March 23) and INEC Killarney (May 3)
A Friend Of The Family, a limited edition series about the abduction of a young girl in 1970s Idaho, was eerie and brilliantly acted (especially by Jake Lacy). It has some of the strongest television writing of recent years.
War Pony, Riley Keough's first film as director, follows a bunch of teens on the Pine Lodge Indian Reservation and is downbeat and hopeful simultaneously. Really strong work from Elvis's eldest grandchild, watch out for more...
I've come and gone out of hip hop phases for 30 years now – the music has its troughs and fallow periods – but I've loved some of the records coming from the Atlanta trap scene in recent times. JID's The Forever Story, which came out late last year, is pure pleasure, with fabulous poetics and incredibly crisp production.
Deadwood creator David Milch's memoir, Life's Work, is funny, brilliant and incredibly poignant, written from the distant territory of his Alzheimer's confinement. It describes a life (more or less) disgracefully lived that has given the world so much great art.
Probably reading an old John McGahern story, Why We're Here, on a ridiculously beautiful sunny morning in County Sligo early in May.
I have become addicted to late-night Drama TV channel viewing. Dalziel and Pascoe is a detective series – I always like detective series – from 1996 with this incredible actor, Warren Clarke, an actor from A Clockwork Orange. My partner [Aidan Gillen] started watching it and said, “That’s really excellent TV.”
We went to see The Waeve with Graham Coxon and his partner Rose Elinor Dougall at The Grand Social in Dublin. It was very theatrical and explosive. He sang, she sang, with their band. It was a fantastic gig.
Somewhere Out There You at the Abbey Theatre by Nancy Harris, directed by Wayne Jordan, was a magical lucky bag of great theatre and storytelling. I always love fantastical theatre where the sets change. There was a wonderful moment where a character acting as a teacher suddenly tap-danced. It was joyful and laugh-out-loud.
I loved Fun Home in the Gate Theatre, beautifully directed by Róisín McBrinn. It’s about a girl looking back at a complicated relationship with her father, all about identity. Incredible singing. Great cast, with Killian Donnelly in the lead. It was magical.
I enjoyed bringing 15 children to see Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. I found it an incredible experience to watch a gig on a movie screen. I went down dancing with some of the mothers and it was brilliant, three hours of joyfulness. Everybody should see it to understand why she has taken over.
I love The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel. It’s about a 1950s housewife who ends up as a comedian. It’s a beautiful, colourful escapist fantasy world to get lost in. So nice to look at. The acting is fantastic. I love Midge’s story. And that it nailed the ending, which is rare in long-running shows.
In terms of sheer enjoyment, Barbie was amazing. It was joyous, funny and poignant. Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling – what a pair. The musical numbers were incredible.
Brutus is an amazing band from Belgium. They make unapologetic, cinematic music with elements of metal, post-rock, black metal. I love that mix. The singer Stefanie has a voice of nature. It’s so powerful like, say, on Love Won’t Hide the Ugliness.
Iron Maiden at the 3Arena was my gig of the year by a huge margin. They brought their A game, playing all of Somewhere in Time, which is my favourite Maiden album, and songs they hadn’t played in 30 years. A gig for old-school, hardcore fans.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty was an expansion of the game that came out a few years ago. The stories in today’s games are better than most movies. This one has themes of personal freedom and privacy in a corporate dystopia. Also it has Keanu Reeves and Idris Elba.
Rotting in the Sun directed by Sebastián Silva is full-on. It’s a drama, which is not for everyone, but I was laughing out loud watching it. It’s original, a bit crazy and a bit wild.
Offica is a rapper from Drogheda, part of a crew called A92. They’ve been making some big moves in the last few years. His debut mixtape album Hokage is out. He’s got a lot to say.
I saw group from Louth called Negro Impacto at Electric Picnic. Chi Chi is a brilliant singer and StrangeLove is a multi-instrumentalist who does the beats. A young Cork artist called Diamond – who raps, sings and plays the trumpet – was playing with them that day. They’re a fresh, young group in the soul/jazz/hip hop terrains.
I reread Dan Hancox’s Inner City Pressure, the best book I’ve read in years. Ostensibly it’s about the history of grime music, but it’s really a social commentary on London and a dive into where the music came from – the streets, pirate radio stations, youth culture and spaces. It’s powerful.
I hosted an exhibition with Mark Murphy from Choice Cuts celebrating 50 years of hip hop through the lens of jazz in Cork’s St. Peter’s church on Jazz Festival weekend. We exhibited record covers, told the story through Irish photographers, with pictures of jazz and hip hop legends like Roy Ayers, Erykah Badu and De La Soul, and did talks and workshops. A lot of kids came. It was cool.
I had no idea what Oppenheimer would be about and how they would work the story. I was quite fascinated with the whole thing. It was very disturbing.
I love Lankum’s new record, False Lankum. I keep listening to it. They almost rip your insides out. It’s visceral trad – the way Radie Peat sings.
Seeing, along with my kids, Rickie Lee Jones at the National Concert Hall was nice. She did all new material – old songs she learned from her mother and father from the 1950s.
I loved MÁM. I love every production Michael Keegan-Dolan does. I love the music, the dancing. The man is amazing.
Madame Butterfly, with the full ballet company, performed in the middle of Sydney Harbour on a pontoon, with the Opera House and Sydney skyscape behind us. They built the set while we were walking in. Unbelievable.
I love Bad Sisters. It’s great to see women in the forefront, leading the show. Women supporting women. Sharon Horgan is very clever. She writes real women.
In The Killer, with Michael Fassbender, I love the way he doesn’t have dialogue for the first while. It’s just an inner monologue. It’s something different.
The pianist Ludovico Einaudi in the 3Arena was just him and a piano. An incredible night. To say “rollercoaster” would be an understatement.
The Solution by Sean Dunne at the Project Arts Centre, which was part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, was a brilliant show, brave and bold. I haven’t seen anything done like it on stage all year.
I spent a lot of the year shooting in Clare, driving up and down the motorway from Dublin, listening a lot to My Therapist Ghosted Me. I never thought I’d enjoy it but it’s nice easy listening.
My life has been taken over by a small child since last Christmas and the only TV we now watch is Ms. Rachel on YouTube. She's the third parent.
I did manage to squeeze in a new scary movie this Halloween. Talk To Me is a brilliant, creepy film which seems harder to find every year.
There's an album called Lullaby Baby by Nursery Rhymes 123 that is now as vital to my daily life as breakfast is.
I spent a delightful evening in the Abbey Theatre watching Somewhere Out There You by Nancy Harris. A dazzling set and some amazing performances.
We took a family trip to the RDS to see the Coca Cola Christmas truck and have some hot chocolate. The perfect way to get into the Christmas spirit.
The little television I watch tends to be football-related.
Holy Emy, a strange, complex story of two Athens-based Filipino sisters, the thoughtful and inventive debut feature of hugely talented Greek filmmaker Araceli Lemos.
The new (old) Beatles song, Now and Then. A throwaway, maybe, and a product of now as much as anything bygone, but in moments still somehow overwhelmingly moving.
A tie, between Noel O'Regan's belting, Though the Bodies Fall, and Ethel Crowley's Life at Full Tilt, resurrecting the extraordinary work of Dervla Murphy.
In enlightening upon the multitudes that make up Bob Dylan, Waterford-born Corkman Martin McCarthy's long poem, The Perfect Voice, itself tumbles gloriously headlong into art.
