2022: The best theatre of the year
An early-career masterpiece, an audio play about lockdown, and spins on theatre's past crimes.
Once pandemic restrictions were lifted, and we were allowed to step inside theatre doors again, the return yielded a question: what are we going back to?
It would have been understandable to fear (as I did last year) that given the disruption to employment and box office over the previous two years, the adventurousness that characterised theatre programming in the years before COVID-19 would ground to a halt. As during the Recession, we could have had the blue-chip stock of plays by Seán O’Casey and Oscar Wilde. Instead, what we got was a reset.
A bustling first programme by directors Caitríona McLaughlin and Mark O’Brien saw the Abbey Theatre (which is the standout frontrunner in the categories below, with 14 mentions) change direction from a previous administration that was heavy on adaptations and co-productions, and instead became committed to big-budget risks such as An Octoroon and Portia Coughlan.
Other companies also made conscious decisions to change their tone and appearance. The seriously prestigious Druid leant into the giddy provocations of The Cavalcaders and, more notably, The Last Return – which secures that company the second-largest total of references in this list, with five nods). The Gate Theatre’s financial model left it vulnerable during the pandemic, and yet departing director Selina Cartmell took chances on admirable collaborations (the gig-theatre play Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster) and secured a starry production of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist classic Endgame. (The Gate ties in third place below, along with dance company Junk Ensemble). In terms of travel, Landmark Productions brought the Gabriel Byrne bio-play Walking with Ghosts to Broadway – a first for an Irish company in 15 years.
Hearteningly, it was also a year filled with memorable new faces, some of whom appear across the categories below.
As for the virus – it didn’t go away. The prodigious efforts of the Abbey Theatre and Lyric Theatre kept their co-production of Brian Friel’s masterwork Translations on the road, while understudies have appeared in credits as recent as the Gate Theatre’s current musical Piaf.
COVID-19 itself seemed like an overbearing topic to tackle in art – how do you begin to approach it? Brokentalkers’s play The Boy Who Never Was, which leaned heavily into the Spanish Flu-era of its source material, went so far as to show actors taking antigen tests onstage. More affecting were the acknowledgements of having lived through a mass trauma event – whether in the suggestion of Thisispopbaby and Dublin Fringe Festival’s uplifting circus-play Wake, or as explicitly as Sunday’s Child immensely consoling audio play Conviction, which dared to bring us on yet another walk during lockdown.
By the end of the year, we have worrying reports everywhere of audience attendance not returning to pre-COVID levels. The future of the medium is uncertain.
As an aside: during those revelatory weeks of the Dublin Fringe Festival, a mentorship programme for early-career artists of colour heralded several new plays that evolved the audience demographic. The power of representation – it ain’t no joke.