While I officially love the theatre, I don't actually go to see plays that often for a variety of reasons. One of these is my own idiosyncratic tastes, which mean that that the kinds of plays I like tend not to be performed that much. But also there is the problem that the theatre is something you have to book tickets for ages in advance, which does not suit a disorganised person like me. And there is the simple fact that the theatre is a lot more expensive than the cinema (for good reasons), which makes me more wary of taking a punt on a particular show. So this is not actually a list of my favourite productions of 2024 but all of the ones I made it to.
Exit Pursued by a Bear (Whyte Recital Hall)
The title is a stage direction from William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Publicity material suggested that this production from the innovative Pan Pan theatre company would retell Shakespeare's play from the point of view of the bears. Sadly this proved not to be the case and it was actually a kind of deconstructed performance of the original with a lot of songs (including the David Essex one, which I see now was written by Mike Batt and Tim Rice). It could have done with either featuring more bears or being a straighter Shakespeare production.
The Sugar Wife (Abbey Theatre)
Back in the 1990s there was a lot of theatre on that I liked and a lot of it featured Liz Kuti in key roles. I particularly remember her as Florence Nightingale in a production of Edward Bond's bananas Early Morning and in the title role in a production of The Duchess of Malfi. Then she stopped acting, became Elizabeth Kuti, and pursued a career in academia in the UK. And she also took to writing for the theatre. This one was first staged in Ireland in 2005 but I somehow missed it, but I went to this revival to chase the 1990s theatre buzz. And… it's not great. The play is about fictionalised analogues of the 19th century Quaker founders of the Bewley's cafes in Dublin, who are faced by awkward questions about where sugar comes from in a time when the United States is still a nation of slavery. But it all felt a bit didactic and suffered badly from their supposedly idealistic visitor being a transparent dickhead from the moment he appears onstage. And for a play partly about race it gives the one black character very little to do.
Dracula: Lucy's Passion
Last year as a Halloween treat Joan Sheehy brought Dracula: A Journey into Darkness to the Abbey, a staged reading by Andrew Bennett of the first four chapters of Dracula. Now she follows that with this multi-actor reading of the bits of Dracula that see the Count travel to England and prey upon the unfortunate Lucy. And it was also staged for one night only as part of the Bram Stoker Festival. Atmospheric and at times chilling, it maybe suffered from being less focussed than the single point of view we got last year as Jonathan Harker describes himself becoming ever more ensnared by the Count. I nevertheless can't wait for the third part next year.
Old Times (Smock Alley Boys' School)
There is this Liverpool theatre company called Purple Door and they regularly tour to Dublin with what seems to be always either plays by Shakespeare or Pinter. This year they were doing two Harold Pinter plays in rep, with this one the most Pintery as it starts off with a couple talking about how some old friend of the wife has invited herself to visit after a hiatus before it becomes harder and harder to work out what exactly is going on, with past, present, and imagination seeming to merge in one unsettling splodge of menace. Excellent stuff.
Some impressive shots of the production on Instagram here
Na Peirsigh (Peacock Theatre)
Someone had the great idea of staging this nearly 2,500 year old play by Aeschylus, translated into Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. It tells of people in the Persian capital learning that their invasion of Greece has gone horribly wrong. And I went to see it, despite my Irish not being great, hoping that I would be able to follow it well enough thanks to having an outline idea of how Greek tragedy works without having to look too frequently at the surtitles. And it's great, capturing the ritualistic aspects of what even by the standards of Greek tragedy was an early work, from a time when the theatre had not long left behind its origins in religious ceremony. I think the most striking part of the play was when the Persians summon up the ghost of the late emperor Darius the Great, which did feel like an actual summoning (all the more amusing for the shade of Darius then pretty much just grumbling about how his idiot son has fucked it all up). But a close runner up is when Xerxes (said idiot son) arrives at the end, alone and in rags, his army destroyed, to sing a sean-nós style lament about how miserable he is. Really superb stuff and that's without getting into how the original play was striking for its sympathetic presentation of the people who had burned Aeschylus' city to the ground barely ten years previously.
I read some reviews of this excellent production and they were really sniffy about it, which I think illustrates how removed I am from mainstream theatrical opinion.
Dune! The Musical (SEC Glasgow)
Everyone loves Frank Herbert's novel Dune but what if instead of having to read it you could see it performed onstage by one guy taking on the role of Gurney Halleck telling you the whole story through the medium of song? So it was that I was pleased to see this production by Dan Collins at the Glasgow Worldcon.
Betrayal (Smock Alley Boys' School)
More Purple Door Pinter, performed in rep with Old Times. This one is more conventional than Old Times in that it is always clear what is going on: we have a narrative about a woman who is having an affair with a close friend of her husband. Adultery narratives can be a bit ho-hum but this hits the spot. Part of it is the formal innovation of telling the story backwards: we start with the two former lovers meeting some time after their affair ended, then we jump back to the affair's end, then to it in full flight and finally to its beginning. One thing I found as it rolled along was that my sense of which of the characters I liked (or disliked the least) kept changing as the perspective through which they were viewed adjusted. An unnerving classic staged and acted with bravura.
Betrayal did get me thinking about the whole business of ongoing affairs (not shagging around or copping off with someone you then leave your significant other for, but an ongoing bit-on-the-side you want to keep secret from everyone). They sound like a lot of work.
Intstagram shots of the production here.
images:
Martha Dunlea as Lucy Westenra (Bram Stoker Festival: Lucy's Passion)
Caitríona Ní Mhurchú i Na Peirsigh (Amharclann na Mainistreach: Na Peirsigh)
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