2024 was a year of mixed fortunes for theatre in Northern Ireland. The year began well with Jimmy Fay, Executive Producer of Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, retaining his place for a second successive year in The Stage’s prestigious list of the industry’s 100 most influential figures for steering the venue through difficult financial times “to be a theatre with energy and artistic confidence”.
That effort was rewarded with 10 Broadway World awards and a Debut Award nomination from The Stage for director Emily Foran for her accomplished Lyric mainstage debut, a stylish, charming and winning production of Little Women.
The Lyric also revealed its new open-air playing space with a thrilling, community-based A Midsummer Night’s Dream and enjoyed acclaimed runs in Dublin and New York for its revival of Owen McCafferty’s Agreement.
It wasn’t alone in finding recognition abroad in a year that saw Northern Irish theatre achieve an unprecedented profile on the international stage. Sharing the limelight in America were C21 Theatre with Charis McRobert’s Expecting (one of my 2023 highlights), Kabosh Theatre playing Laurence McKeown’s Green & Blue in five States and Big Telly, whose The Worst Café in the World picked up an Irish Festival award for its run in New York.
Elsewhere, playwright Jane Coyle’s Both Sides had its European première in Paris, while GBL Productions took Richard O’Rawe and Martin Lynch’s In the Name of the Son (a 2022 highlight) to Australia and New Zealand.
Closer to home, Prime Cut Productions’ Lie Low by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth and Ruairi Conaghan’s Lies Where It Falls (another of my 2023 highlights) enjoyed well-received runs in London at the Royal Court and Finborough theatres.
There was sign of new growth, too, with the launch of two dance companies: Michael McEvoy’s Northern Attitudes, whose The Gate House was a more than promising debut, and the all-Ireland Luail, who will partner with Belfast-based Maiden Voyage Dance.
Also new was the creation of a bursary for young, working-class creatives in memory of actress Julie Maxwell, who died in 2019, and Women Theatremakers in Northern Ireland, a podcast series created by Queen’s University’s Shonagh Hill.
Chastening to know that such activity takes place against a stubbornly parlous funding environment. Several surveys this year highlighted the calamitous effects of nearly 20 years of successive cuts.
Research by actors’ union Equity revealed a 16% cut in arts funding since 2017. That figure seems generous in a longer perspective. A decade ago, the region’s Arts Council received £14.1 million. Had it kept in pace with inflation, it would now be £20 million. This year it has £10.2 million, an additional £500,000 increase smacking of tokenism.
Two startling Arts Council surveys revealed the mean income of £11,200 for arts workers amounted to an 11% drop since 2010, while the industry registered job losses and 22% fewer performances year on year, amongst many other woes.
The brute consequence of which was the closure, after funding was withdrawn, of independent company Pintsized Productions and Derry’s 372-seat Waterside Theatre.
But Northern Ireland’s theatre community never fails to get back up again, no matter how many times it has been knocked down. Here, in chronological order, are my top 10 shows of 2024.
Performed to an audience of one, Replay’s Hollow was a miniature marvel for an autistic or neurodivergent child (with parents and guardians discreetly accommodated) in The Mac’s intimate Factory space. Director Andrew Stanford and a cast of three devised “a world of sensory wonder” in designer Darren Robinson’s “entirely immersive and persuasive environment”.
Having only caught the last performance of Little Women at the Lyric Theatre, I regretted not having reviewed it. Anne-Marie Casey’s adaptation of the much-loved classic was treated to a pitch-perfect production by Emily Foran marshalling a superb ensemble cast. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Ensemble playing was also to the fore in the return of Owen McCafferty’s Agreement. Some new casting added a more nuanced dimension to this incisive portrait of the negotiations leading to the historic Good Friday Agreement to “confirm the initial impression of this… as a play of immediate and lasting significance”.
Echoes of Tolstoy, Sartre and Eugene O’Neill in Íde Simpson and Beth Strahan’s Cailíní—“a domestic drama that winds itself up into unbearable, unspeakable tension”—announced the arrival of two names and their company, Ablaze Productions, to watch.
A “cauldron of caustic wit and corrosive violence” was delivered in Emma Jordan’s staging of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman for Prime Cut Productions and the Lyric Theatre with compelling central performances by Abigail McGibbon’s interrogator and UK Theatre Award-nominated Keith Singleton’s luckless prisoner.
In “a remarkable act of creative legerdemain [presenting] a main-house staple as street theatre and community carnival”, audacity and imagination combined in Jimmy Fay’s al fresco A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Lyric. Enlisting numerous community groups in a staging that spilled out into adjoining streets, not even drenching July rain dampened its intoxicating spirit.
The revival by Kabosh of Dominic Montague’s Callings to mark the launch 50 years ago of the LGBTQIA+ counselling and support service, Cara-Friend, was blessed by a pointed script, sensitive performances and assured direction. “A play about yesterday [that] is also a timely play for today… there’s something joyous about Callings in its assertion of selfhood and advocacy for love as a right for all.”
There was “heart aplenty at work in a portrait of a heartless man” in The Tragedy of Richard III—a rare second Shakespeare offering in the same year from the Lyric–with Michael Patrick, wheelchair-bound with Motor Neurone Disease, memorable and moving as the titular monarch. Not everything hit home in Oisín Kearney’s production, but it was distinguished by ambition and the sheer tenacity of Patrick’s performance.
Fresh from picking up a Best Revival gong from UK Theatre Awards for its 2023 staging of Rhino, director Patrick J O’Reilly and Tinderbox turned their attention to Lorca’s Yerma, relocating it to the Irish border’s rural hinterland. Boasting a standout performance by Caoimhe Farren in the title role and Tracey Lindsay’s audacious set—a car into and out of which actors made their entrances and exits—it cemented a growing “reputation for resurrecting European classics in new stagings as imaginative as they are illuminating”.
Returning from New York to Belfast’s Grand Opera House, Cahoots NI’s The Vanishing Elephant blended Charles Way’s sensitive script, Helen Foan’s characterful puppets, Paul Bosco Mc Eneaney’s adroit direction and an internationally-sourced cast to deliver a moving spectacle for audiences of all ages.
Honourable mentions must also go to Northern Ireland Opera’s Eugene Onegin, imaginatively staged by Cameron Menzies and with a breakthrough performance by Mary McCabe, the revival of Amanda Verlaque’s This Sh*t Happens All the Time lifted by Nicky Harley’s bravura performance, Conor Mitchell’s revival of his semi-autobiographical The Doppler Effect, a stunning mix of music, dance and video, and Dan Gordon’s impressive Ebenezer Scrooge in Marie Jones’s relocating of A Christmas Carol to Belfast.
Kudos, too, to Patsy Montgomery-Hughes’s still young tenure of Bright Umbrella and its championing of the Sanctuary Theatre. With plans underway to refashion and improve the repurposed church, it made strides forward with the launch of its Bringing it All Back Home series spotlighting East Belfast talent early in the year, and a charming take on C S Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew at year’s end.