10 treats that made 2010 bearable

CULTURE SHOCK:AT LEAST THERE were the pleasures of the mind and heart. Here, in no particular order and by no means exhaustively, are 10 cultural experiences that helped make 2010 endurable

1 Michael Gambon in Krapp’s Last Tapeat the Gate

If there was any doubt about Gambon’s standing as a great actor, it vanished at the very beginning of Beckett’s play as he raised his head to reveal something that should not be visible: the gaunt face of a young man inside the face of his older self. The poignant delicacy of his movements was all the more moving because he is a big, imposing man. The way he used two different Dublin voices – one pompous and affected, the other rough and demotic – told us his ear is no less delicate. If the ghost of Micheál MacLiammóir was hovering in the wings, even the old maestro would have acknowledged an equal.

2 Claire Keegan’s Foster

That most potentially awkward of things, a novella – neither short story nor novel – Fostermade concerns about such categories immediately irrelevant. It may be fewer than 90 pages long, but it lingers in the mind for much longer than many a hefty tome. Not much happens. The narrator is driven by her father to a place she has never been and leaves, without explanation, with a couple she does not know. After a while she returns home. There is no high drama, no linguistic pyrotechnics. There is just that sensation, always amazing however often you feel it, of being in the hands of a writer who has weighed every word for its exactitude of sound, rhythm and truth.

3 Zakir Hussein's Masters of Percussion, New York

At its heights, Indian classical music expresses the idea of a sound that almost attains the plenitude of silence. The dazzling tabla master Zakir Hussein is almost as astonishing to watch as he is to listen to: his hands, at times, move so fast that they blur into invisibility. But awe at this technical virtuosity soon gives way to the sheer joy of the ecstatic rhythms. The last 20 minutes of this concert, with Hussein joined by three other great classical percussionists, a troupe of Dhaki folk drummers, the great sarangi player Sabir Khan and the violin duo Ganesh and Kumaresh, made me wonder why anyone needs drugs.

4 Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies

Not entirely a masterpiece – Murray’s adult figures are predictable comic types – but the adolescents in and around his south Dublin school are grippingly vivid creations. Murray has the gift of neither patronising nor romanticising the young. He also has the skill to hold together the ambitious architecture of a tragicomic epic.

5 Emma Donoghue’s Room

Like, I suspect, many other readers, I had to brace myself before diving into a novel about a child who has spent all his life locked in a small room with his mother by the man who abducted her. But Donoghue’s book is not “about” the Fritzl case or any other example of human depravity. It is about imagination, language, storytelling, the wonders of the human mind and, above all, love. Having avoided mere bleakness, she is also on her guard to avoid trite consolation. But this is a fortifying book. I heard parents of young kids say they couldn’t bear to read it. In fact, it is a wonderful book for reminding parents what they do and why they matter.

6 Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain

Heaney's status, as a poet and a presence, is such that reading (or at least buying) his latest collection can feel like a civic duty. Human Chainis indeed full of grace and wisdom and all the qualities of the tribal elder. But it is also marked by fragility and vulnerability – the physical brittleness of the body after a stroke, the tenuousness of memories that will vanish with their possessor. This is not, then, an oracular book. But, lacking other oracles, it is hard not to look to Heaney for public meaning. His line about love "that's proved by steady gazing / Not at each other but in the same direction" would not be a bad motto for the nation.

7 James Cheechoo, Toronto

This was one of those unsettling moments when you encounter something familiar in a startlingly different context. James Cheechoo is an 80-year-old fiddler from northern Canada. He played traditional Irish and Scottish dance tunes. But he’s a member of the Cree nation. The Crees’ connection with the fiddle and with these tunes goes all the way back the 1670s, when they began trading with the Hudson Bay Company. They played them with skin drums and their own rhythms. Seeing Cheechoo play was deeply moving.

His memory is fading, so his son would hold a tape recorder to his ear. He’d remember the tune and off he’d go – a living image of a past revivified.

8 Gabriel Metsu exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland

Out of the shadow of Vermeer, this superbly organised exhibition brought the delightful work of the Dutch 17th-century painter Gabriel Metsu. Beautiful in themselves, the paintings also gave the lie to all the cliches about killjoy Protestantism. Metsu worked in a Calvinist culture, but its disdain for religious images pushed him into exploring an astonishing range of subjects with inexhaustible invention.

9 John Gabriel Borkmanat the Abbey

It is hard for us to take a corrupt banker seriously as a tragic figure, and the great thing about Alan Rickman’s performance as Ibsen’s eponymous protagonist is that he didn’t try to make us do so. He turned in instead a magnificent account, half terrifying, half ludicrous, of monstrous egotism. With high-octane performances from Fiona Shaw, Cathy Belton and Lindsay Duncan, this was a wonderfully odd piece of theatre, as brilliant as it was bonkers.

10 The Magnetic Fields, Realism

Stephin Merritt is the genius bastard child of Edgar Allen Poe and Cole Porter. Realismis not his best work, but two great songs could have been specially written for us. From a Sinking Boat speaks for itself. You Must Be Out of Your Mindis a hymn to Fianna Fáil (and perhaps to 2010): "I want you crawling back to me / Down on your knees, yeah / Like an appendectomy / Sans anaesthesia." There's even a cheery Christmas song: "Stop mumbling and cheer up / Put down the book, pick beer up." Good advice.