Richard Fitzpatrick: Our arts/culture journalists pick their personal highlights of the year
Richard Fitzpatrick's arts and culture picks of the year include Baby Reindeer, Lankum, LCD Soundsystem, and Bewley’s Café Theatre.
Catching LCD Soundsystem with All My Friends, or at least with four of them, on a long summer’s night in the gardens of Dublin’s Malahide Castle, was a memorable experience. Hard to beat their disco punk sound, and Nancy Whang, on synthesizer duty, for being such a badass.
Bewley’s Café Theatre on Grafton Street has been providing lunchtime theatre, a respite from the day, for a quarter of a century. Stewart Roche’s A Christmas Visit, brought back for a re-run this year, is the kind of play that sticks in the marrow of your bones. Magnetic performances from Jed Murray and Cork actress Lesley Conroy in the lead roles, old flames reunited on Christmas Eve.
Hard to imagine Nick Cave is still at the top of his game more than 40 years after the demise of The Birthday Party. He’s a shaman, and arguably unrivalled as a life performer. Experiencing one of his Wild God tour gigs left me in awe of his sorcery.
To my shame, I saw neither Kneecap’s film nor did I see them live, even though everyone has been talking about them. I’ll address the former omission over the Christmas holidays and will hope to fix the latter sometime next year. Tiocfaidh ár lá.
It took about three months to get an interview with Fran Lebowitz, the Dorothy Parker of our age. She would only do a phone interview, but she didn’t disappoint, cutting contemporaries from the New York scene such as Andy Warhol and Donald Trump down to size with her acerbic wit.
Lebowitz famously doesn’t own a computer or a mobile phone, and suffers from writer’s block.
Kevin Barry’s novel The Heart in Winter might be his best. I luxuriated in it. A beautifully written, bittersweet story about a couple of lovers on the run from bounty-hunters in Montana in the 1890s. It is so, so funny. Can’t wait to listen to the audiobook version.
A Dangerous Boy, a documentary film about Sigurdur Thordarson, otherwise known as Siggi, the teenage Icelandic hacker who became Julian Assange’s right-hand man and later an FBI spy, is excellent.
The documentary leaves you conflicted. Nothing is black and white with Siggi’s disturbing story, which is leavened by the most outlandish secondary character imaginable, a priest who becomes Siggi’s chaperone.
I watched Baby Reindeer peeking through my hands. What an incredible piece of television – gripping, funny, sad, painful, amazing acting. And mercifully – in an age where TV shows are unnecessarily long – it was just the right length: seven episodes, each a little over half an hour long.
Runaway Joe, a nine-part podcast series by the peerless RTÉ Documentary On One team is an unbelievable listen. It’s about an American charged with killing his wife in the 1960s. He escaped to Ireland, on the run from the FBI, where he lived until 1986, eluding extradition at the last minute to continue his life on the run. An inspiring piece of investigation by producers Pavel Barter and Corkman Tim Desmond, who broke new ground in the story.
Got to see Lankum in the Apollo, a small, one-time cabaret theatre in Barcelona, in September. They nearly lifted the roof off. The Catalanistas, who were mixed with Irish ex-pats, gave Ian Lynch a particularly big cheer when he roared “Brits out!” at one stage.
Enjoyed the first five seasons of The Crown, especially the season about Margaret Thatcher. I tried watching the sixth season in the New Year, but had to abandon it after a few episodes because it was such gibberish.
The great Neil Young has just announced he’s going to tour Europe again in 2025, sticking to outdoor venues. A date is looming that will be tattooed into my diary.
He’s fantastic live, and with a body of work that’s touched by angels.
