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Irish Times critics look forward to unmissable cultural events next year

Sat Dec 27 2003 - 00:00

Irish Times critics look forward to unmissable cultural events next year

1 Theatre
The Abbey and Europe
As part of the centenary celebrations, the Abbey presents a European season featuring sparkling and innovative theatre from Poland, Hungary and Slovenia, with new versions of two classical European plays by our own Tom Murphy and Seamus Heaney. The Polish director Grzegorz Jarzyna (with the convenient pseudonym "H"), has created a stage production of Festen, a famous film by Tomas Vinterberg about a family with layers of concealed trauma and animosity celebrating its patriarch's birthday. A colourful, mixed-genre production of A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Slovenian Vito Taufer, comes from the Mladinsko Theatre in Ljubljana. Both these productions will feature surtitles. Dance in Time (Össztánc), needs none - it's a wordless yet eloquent piece of physical theatre by acclaimed Hungarian director László Marton. Murphy has worked a new version of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard, directed by Patrick Mason, with design and lighting by Joe Vanek and Paul Keogan, and Heaney has created a timely and cogent piece, The Burial at Thebes, based on Sophocles's Antigone. A very promising selection of theatre of a kind not often offered in this country.
Christine Madden
Abbey Theatre Centenary, January-May www.abbeytheatre.ie/abbey100

2 Theatre

David Hare's Skylight

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When do we get the chance to see David Hare's exceptional stage work in Dublin? Skylight, a chamber piece from 1995, which premièred at London's National Theatre, was highly acclaimed, and went on to run successfully on Broadway. Directed by Michael Caven, the two-hander features Owen Roe playing a tough businessman and Cathy Belton as his one-time lover in an extra-marital affair. He turns up at her icy flat one cold winter night, and the sparks fly. Hare's work includes The Secret Rapture, The Judas Kiss and The Blue Room, and the screenplays for Damage and The Hours. His latest play, The Permanent Way, about the privatisation of  British Rail, directed by Max Stafford-Clark, moves to London in January.

Christine Madden

Skylight, Project, Dublin, January 17th to March 6th before going on national tour

[ www.project.ie ]

3 Classical Music

RTE NSO/Benjamin Zander

Benjamin Zander's début with the RTÉ NSO in January 2002, when he conducted Johann Strauss and Mahler, lifted the orchestra temporarily on to a higher plane of musical and technical delivery. Zander, who's probably better-known as a management guru than as a conductor - he uses his musical experiences to shape his management advice - returns to Dublin to work his magic in a programme of Britten (the Simple Symphony), Beethoven (the Second Piano Concerto with Philip Martin) and Brahms (the Second Symphony).

Michael Dervan

RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra/Benjamin Zander. NCH, Dublin, Friday, January 23rd

[ www.rte.ie/music/nso/ ]

[ www.nch.ie ]

4 Traditional Music

Planxty Reunion

They've christened it the third coming, with just a hint of understatement. In the early 1970s, Planxty - Christy Moore, Donal Lunny, Liam O'Flynn and Andy Irvine - took traditional music by the scruff of the neck and landed it in the 20th century. They made no apologies for melding traditional dance tunes with folk songs, too long severed from the music. It was a gathering that allowed Moore forge his on-stage persona: an uncompromising figure, fast tracking his way towards trad-nirvana, taking few prisoners en route. This time round, the pace might be more considered but expect the same passion that'll ensure the music breaks free of the fetters of the past.

Siobhán Long

Planxty, Glór Irish Music Centre, Ennis, January 23rd and 24th; Vicar Street, Dublin, January 30th and 31st and February 4th, 5th, 11th and 12th

5 Country/Folk

Kris Kristofferson

A graduate of Oxford University and former officer in the US army, Kris Kristofferson returns to Ireland after a 10-year absence - not as an established actor with several good movie roles to his credit but as a country/folk singer and songwriter with more than his fair share of classic songs, including Me and Bobby McGee and Help Me Make it Through the Night. Essentially, Kristofferson is Leonard Cohen as if raised in Nashville, a remarkably intelligent, eloquent and - by country standards at least - radical chronicler of the human condition in all its fragile states. Despite his often corrosive attitudes towards music industry nonsense, he was inducted into the Texas Country Music Hall Of Fame earlier this year.

Tony Clayton-Lea

Kris Kristofferson, The Point, Dublin, January 31st and February 1st

[ www.thepoint.ie ]

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6 Art

Francesco Clemente at IMMA

Francesco Clemente became a big star during the neo-expressionist revival in painting towards the close of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Wealthy before he ever put brush to canvas, he is a friend of Julian Schnabel and Brice Marden, and he is nomadic by nature, equally at home in New York as in an Indian ashram. An inveterate self-mythologiser, he often features as protagonist in his larger-than-life paintings, expressive creations that draw on wildly eclectic mixtures of sexual, religious and mythical imagery. He freely borrows and combines whatever he likes from cultures all over the globe. In fact, so besotted is he by myth that it sometimes seems as if he would ideally like to start his own religion. As regards the quality of his painting, it can certainly be a bit hit and myth, but when he gets it right it's like watching a conjurer do the impossible: you know it's a trick but you can't quite figure out how it's done. IMMA's show is his first major Irish appearance, and it features some 64 works, including paintings from a series made over the last few years, plus watercolours and pastels (left: Love, by Francesco Clemente, 2000)

Aidan Dunne

Francesco Clemente at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, from February 4th

[ www.modernart.ie ]

7 Theatre

Druid presents Synge

To launch its series of Synge's plays, Druid will present a new production of Playboy of the Western World. Cillian Murphy (Intermission, Disco Pigs) and Anne-Marie Duff (Magdalene Sisters, Amongst Women,) take the lead roles while director Garry Hynes  should give the production a polished yet edgy feel. Her skill in directing the classics of Irish drama has proved itself both here and abroad - in 1998, she became the first woman to win a Tony Award for best director for The Beauty Queen of Leenane on Broadway. Hynes's revisiting of Playboy, which she has directed before, will set the atmosphere for the Synge season.

Christine Madden

Playboy of the Western World, Druid Theatre, Galway, from February 10th; Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, from February 23rd. Further dates to be announced.

[ www.druidtheatre.com ]

8 Classical Music

Living Music Festival

The first RTÉ Living Music Festival, held at The Helix in October, 2002, marked a breakout for the national broadcaster. It treated contemporary music as more than simply a national obligation to programme work by Irish composers, and it followed a clear artistic priority in focusing on the music of Luciano Berio. The focus in the second festival in February is more diverse, with major works by Pierre Boulez (Le marteau sans maître, Trois improvisations sur Mallarmé, and Sur Incises), as well as a range of pieces by middle-generation French spectralists Pascal Dusapin and Tristan Murail. The festival also includes a first Irish appearance by that great Parisian new music group created by Boulez, the Ensemble Intercontemporain.

Michael Dervan

RTÉ Living Music Festival. The Helix, Friday, February 20th-Sunday, February 22nd

[ www.helix.ie ]

9 Theatre

Dancing at Lughnasa

Veteran director Joe Dowling returns for a production of Dancing at Lughnasa. Much admired also in the US for his work at the Guthrie Theatre in Minnesota, Dowling's last Irish production was the superb staging of All My Sons at the Abbey. His history of excellent direction of Irish and international classics speaks for itself. In bringing this very promising mixture of talent together, the Gate continues its long association with Friel, which began in 1964 with Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which it took to Broadway.

Christine Madden

Dancing at Lughnasa, Gate Theatre, from Tuesday, February 24th

[ www.gate-theatre.ie ]

10 Classical Music

RTÉCO/Laurent Wagner

The prospects for the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in standard classical repertoire have been transformed by the arrival of Laurent Wagner as principal conductor. His opening series last October was a landmark in the history of the orchestra, and he's following up in March with four Viennese programmes that bypass Strauss in favour of Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and reach into the 20th century for Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern, and Zemlinsky. The soloists include Antje Weithaas (in the Beethoven Violin Concerto), Anne Gastinel (in Haydn's First Cello Concerto), mezzo soprano Alison Browner (in Mahler's Rückert Lieder), and soprano Regina Nathan (in Mozart's Exsultate, jubilate)

Michael Dervan

RTÉCO/Laurent Wagner. The Helix, Dublin, Fridays, March 13th, 20th, 27th, April 3rd

[ www.rte.ie/music/rteco/ ]

[ www.helix.ie ]

11 Electronica

Kraftwerk

The Dusseldorf-based electronic music pioneers can lay claim to the description "unique" more than most; their early 1970s work was influenced by the experimental electronic works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Tangerine Dream, but by the release of 1974's Autobahn and 1977's Trans Europe Express albums, such influences were surpassed by a naturally elegant fusion of melody, form and restraint. Notoriously reclusive and characteristically evasive, the membership of Kraftwerk has altered over the years and has been made all the more enigmatic by their man/machine interface work ethic (does it matter who they are as long as graceful electronic music is created by pushing a series of computer buttons?). A concert some people have been waiting more than  25 years to see and hear.

Tony Clayton-Lea

Kraftwerk, Olympia Theatre, Dublin, March 15th

[ www.olympia.ie ]

[ www.kraftwerk.com ]

12 World Music

Virgínia Rodrigues

Little wonder that Brazil's tenure in the world music limelight is lengthening when voices such as Virgínia Rodrigues emerge to represent so many of its traditions. When the former cook and manicurist from the city of Bahia sings, prepare to be humbled. Spiritual, dramatic and passionate, Rodrigues may only have released her first album, Sol Negro (collaborations from the sacred to the samba with Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Milton Nascimento), in 1998 but her subsequent transformation from Condomble church singer to world-class performer has been a swift and natural one. A voice truly worthy of diva status, visits to Europe are rare making this Irish show all the more alluring.

Jim Carroll

Virgínia Rodrigues, Liberty Hall, Dublin, Friday, March 19th

[ www.ritmoartists.com ]

13 Jazz/Pop

Norah Jones

Norah Jones doesn't need to be reminded that she's big news; her début album, Come Away With Me, came away from this year's Grammy Awards with eight of them, five of which were the big ones: Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best New Artist, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best Pop Vocal Album. In a short space of time, Jones has become the aural dinner date for many and while the album might now suffer from over familiarity - it haunted the Irish album charts for 82 weeks - there's no denying its many late-night pop/soul/jazz charms. She is currently finalising her new album (scheduled for release this coming February), which will surely give her much-needed breathing space in a live setting.

Tony Clayton-Lea

Norah Jones plays The Point, April 15th

[ www.norahjones.com ]

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[ www.thepoint.ie ]

14 Visual Art

Joyce in art

Though  famously never interested in the visual arts, Joyce has prompted a prodigious response from visual artists, and  ReJoyce Dublin 2004 incorporates some of them. The main two visual arts events of ReJoyce are at the RHA and at IMMA. The latter is putting together a show drawn almost entirely from its own collection, which happens to include Richard Hamilton's prints made over a period of decades in response to Ulysses. Louis le Brocquy's print sequence, Shadows, was made in response to Dubliners, for an illustrated edition of the book. There are illustrated versions of Ulysses by Henri Matisse and Mimmo Paladino and Sidney Nolan's portrait of the artist as a Wild Goose. The laconic wit of the late Charles Brady finds expression in his Joyce's Wallet. The RHA has searched further afield and its show, with an emphasis on conceptual artists, includes both pre-existing works, including pieces by Joyce himself, Constantin Brancusi, Robert Motherwell, Richard Hamilton, Henri Matisse, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Beuys, Patrick Ireland, David Smith, Joseph Kosuth, Christo and  Jeanne Claude. The show also includes new works, however, which should make for a lively mix. Among other featured names are Sean Scully, Kathy Prendergast, Michael Craig-Martin, Ciaran Lennon, Miroslaw Balka, Raymond Pettibon. An impressive line-up, but someone, somewhere should be organising a show of the late Micheal Farrell's Joyce-related work.

Aidan Dunne

Falutin Stuff, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, April 8th to August 1st and Joyce in Arts, is at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, from early June to late August

[ www.modernart.ie ]

[ www.royalhibernianacademy.com ]

[ www.rejoycedublin2004.com ]

15 TV

Angels in America

An ambitious project for the stage and regarded as one of the most important American plays of the last decade, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, has now been made into a television film by the highly-regarded HBO. Directed by Mike Nichols, and with an all-star cast that includes Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson, the full six hours of Kushner's epic has already been screened in two three-hour segments the US. Half of Angels in America was staged in the Abbey in the mid-1990s and those who admired the brilliance of Kushner's writing and his fearless engagement with the issues of Reagan's US  can now view the piece in its entirety when Channel 4 screens the movie.

Gerry Smyth

Angels in America, Channel Four, March

[ www.hbo.com ]

16 Classical Music

Bantry House recitals

Alfred Brendel playing Mozart, Schubert and late Beethoven, and Evgeny Kissin in Chopin, Medtner and Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka (at the NCH on Saturday, March 13th, and Sunday, May 2nd, respectively) will undoubtedly be the high profile piano recitals early in the New Year. But the meatiest piano offering is actually in the south-west, when, over six days at Bantry House, Philippe Cassard, Joanna MacGregor and Hugh Tinney share the honours in a complete cycle of Beethoven's 32 sonatas for piano, one of the most remarkable musical journeys ever, either on or off the keyboard. One of the attractions of this cycle is that each of the six programmes will feature all three performers.

Michael Dervan

Beethoven Piano Sonatas, Bantry House, Co Cork, Saturday, April 10th to Thursday, April 15th

[ www.westcorkmusic.ie ]

17 Modern Music

Gavin Bryars Ensemble

Gavin Bryars brings the most modernist music show to town. His shape-shifting work always surprises and excites. From the eerie, haunting Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet (with the hypnotic lament of an anonymous homeless man looped within an epic orchestral swell) to his collaboration with Robert Wilson for Medea, Bryars's work spans an unique emotional range. This appearance with his ensemble at Dublin's Christchurch Cathedral should be quite an occasion, thanks in part to guest voices John Potter (The Hilliard Ensemble), soprano Anna Friman and sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird.

Jim Carroll

Gavin Bryars Ensemble, Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin,

May 15th

[ www.cccdub.ie ]

[ www.gavinbryars.com ]

18 Dance

Mark Morris Dance Group

The long-awaited International Dance Festival Ireland returns again this year to regale us a second time with a menu of contemporary dance. Its flagship gig, the towering Mark Morris Dance Group, will certainly not disappoint dance lovers thrilled by the movements of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 2002. Formed on an inspired whim of Morris's in 1980, this company has delighted audiences all over the world, and featured three years running as one of the high points of the Edinburgh Festival. Morris's work usually features live music; his innate musicality enables him to blend dance with a wide variety of genres, from classical to country and western. His dance also exemplifies musical technique in harmony and composition. His choreography is also much in demand outside of his eponymous group, with his pieces in the repertoire of companies such as American Ballet Theatre, The Royal Ballet and the Geneva Ballet. A legendary figure of 20th-21st century dance.

Christine Madden

Mark Morris Dance Group at the Abbey Theatre, May 4th and 5th

[ www.dancefestivalireland.ie ]

[ www.mmdg.org ]

19 Exhibition

Ulysses manuscripts

The exhibition of James Joyce's Ulysses manuscripts at the National Library, to be opened in early June, will provide the first real opportunity  for the public to see the remarkable collection of material that the library acquired in early 2002. But the exhibition, being held as part of the celebrations to mark the centenary of the day on which Ulysses is set, June 16th, 1904, will cover a great deal more: using up-to-date technology, and many audio-visual aids, it will offer the most comprehensive perspective on Joyce's masterpiece yet experienced in Dublin. It promises a memorable reconstruction of the sights and sounds of the day when Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Molly Bloom, and many other Dubliners, real and imagined, walked into eternity.

Terence Killeen

James Joyce's Ulysses manuscripts, National Library, Dublin, from June 14th

[ www.rejoycedublin2004.com ]

20 Art

Sophie Calle

Part artist, part detective and a definite candidate for psychoanalysis, Sophie Calle has managed to accumulate one of the strangest bodies of work in contemporary art. This show, in its Pompidou incarnation, has already aroused controversy because of Calle's unorthodox way of incorporating other people's lives in her work. This time, she has investigated the disappearance of a young Frenchwoman, Benedicte Vincens, in Paris three years ago, by means of a forensic installation featuring visual and documentary evidence. In an odd twist, Vincens worked at the Pompidou, was an aspiring photographer and greatly admired Calle. Calle has, famously or infamously, worked as a hotel chambermaid and used the opportunity to amass information on guests; she once followed a stranger to Venice and documented his every move. Her work, obsessively concerned with absence, voyeurism and loss, is strange and fascinating.

Aidan Dunne

Sophie Calle, Irish Museum of Modern Art, June 16th to August 15th

[ www.modernart.ie ]

21 Theatre

Dublin Theatre Festival

The Dublin Theatre Festival is inviting director Declan Donnellan and his company, Cheek By Jowl, to present their new production of Shakespeare's Othello. Donnellan, internationally acclaimed for his cutting-edge, risk-taking productions of the classics, made his last theatrical appearance in Dublin with an all-male version of As You Like It. His book, The Actor and the Target, recommends an incisive and radical approach to overcoming actors' block, and his productions are no less unconventional. In a workshop during the DTF in 2002, Donnellan explained his love of classics - "you still feel that anything could happen, and that's one of the extraordinary things about Shakespeare" - adding  "theatre's a means of discovering, of making some small, blind step in the dark, stumbling and inelegant, but still some attempt, to find out what it is to be human".

Christine Madden

Dublin Theatre Festival, September/October

[ www.dublintheatrefestival.com ]

22 Musical

Mamma Mia!

With more productions playing simultaneously around the world than any other musical (10 across North America, Australia, Japan, Germany and the Netherlands), Mamma Mia! finally makes it to Ireland. The original London production premièred in 1999, and has since grossed more than £100 million in the UK and more than $0.5 billion worldwide. Based on the songs of Abba and set on a Greek island (where a daughter's pre-marriage quest to discover the identity of her father elicits forth a storyline in song), the show's appeal hinges on whether or not people respond to the music of ABBA. With world record sales of over 350 million, failure simply isn't an option - to date, more than 10 million people have seen the show.

Tony Clayton-Lea

Mamma Mia! The Point, Dublin, from September 9th (previews from September 4th)

[ www.thepoint.ie ]

23 Visual Art

Martin Gale

This Nissan Art Project mid-term retrospective of the work of one of the most important realist painters to have emerged in this country since the mid-20th century should be extremely interesting. Gale combines exceptional accessibility with psychological and pictorial complexity. He is primarily interested in character, in human interactions and the way these concerns relate to and are reflected by the landscape. His early work was highly formalised, with stage-like settings. It was the shock of moving to Wicklow in the early 1970s that encouraged him to deal with the real rural landscape. While he has, particularly in recent years, painted landscapes per se, his achievement lies in the way he has built up a formidable body of work encapsulating a view of Irish rural life that has the ring of truth about it. Add to that his ability to evoke the inner lives, the depths and darknesses and doubts, of individuals within this landscape and you have something of exceptional richness.

Aidan Dunne

Nissan Art Project: Martin Gale RHA, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, September 16th to October 24th

[ www.royalhibernianacademy.com ]

24 Jazz

Wayne Shorter

In a first which will certainly have the jazz fraternity buzzing in anticipation, the great saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter is down to headline the next Guinness Jazz Festival in Cork . Now in his seventies and playing as formidably as ever, he will lead a quartet drawn from those who were an integral part of his last album, the deservedly acclaimed alegría , most likely with Danilo Perez (piano), John Patitucci (bass) and Brian Blade (drums) - the quartet that made his Footprints Live! album in 2001. Shorter's pedigree is probably the most distinguished of all living jazz musicians; he helped reshape the repertoire of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers in the early 1960s, and was a vital part of Miles Davis's last great quintet for six years until the start of the 1970s, before founding the seminal and hugely influential Weather Report band with keyboard player Joe Zawinul. It lasted 15 years and since then Shorter has worked with a variety of groups and continued to compose.

Ray Comiskey

Wayne Shorter, Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork, Sunday, October 24th

[ www.corkjazzfestival.com ]

25 Film

Alexander

Irish actor Colin Farrell takes on the challenging title role in Alexander, maverick director Oliver Stone's $200 million epic on the life of Alexander the Great, the fourth-century king who had conquered the world before he died at the age of 32. Joining Farrell in Stone's formidable cast are Angelina Jolie as Alexander's mother, Olympias; Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy; Val Kilmer as King Philip II; Jared Leto as Alexander's best friend, Hephaestion; Rosario Dawson as Alexander's wife, Roxane; and fellow Irish actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Cassander.

Michael Dwyer

Alexander opens in November