View from the Green Room: Arts Review of 2025...shure there’s never anything on in Waterford!
The superb ‘Mosh’ from Waterford’s Rachel Ní Bhraonáin.
It was another bumper year for the Arts in Waterford with new writings, new plays, a new radio play and documentaries, fascinating exhibitions, sell-out concerts and huge musicals drawing large attendances.
Add in the Spraoi Festival of Street Theatre, Writers Weekend, Culture Night, SETU Music Week, the Waterford Chamber Festival, the Imagine Festival, and you get an inkling of a crammed calendar of creative collective artistic work that is hardly replicated anywhere else in the country.
There is really no substitute for a live performance. It isn’t always good; but when it is, it’s magical and you will never leave a live performance without being a participant in a creative process.
We each carry that piece of magic with us when we leave; because the creative moment always lives in the memory. All theatre is really collaboration between writer, performer and audience; each is an active participant in the creative performance and that is why no two performances are ever the same.
There were some big birthdays this year. Waterford Dramatic Society celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary with a sell-out run of John B Keane’s ‘Big Maggie’ in April, while Stagemad’s twentieth anniversary production of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ was a November highlight.
Waterford Youth Arts had a big fortieth celebration with a Gala Night in The Large Room on a beautiful summer’s night in August before bidding adieu to their popular Artistic Director Ollie Breslin upon his retirement.
Waterford Panto was forty years in existence in December and their sell-out Cinderella panto in the Theatre Royal was probably their finest. We had two pantos this year in the city and Richie Hayes’s fun-filled ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ at the SETU Arena was also a Christmas sell-out.
Portlaw Panto also staged Jack and the Beanstalk, while Carrick-on-Suir Musical Society produced Alice in Wonderwall.
Waterford Musical Society had a tenth anniversary concert in May, while Waterford Organ Festival had its fifth birthday.
The Waterford Museum of Treasures hosted the ‘International Festival of Time’ in May and ‘Memories of the Emergency: Waterford People and the Second World War’ in November. The popular Broderick Talks at the Museum concluded its decade-long series of lunchtime lectures on the history of Ireland in the twentieth century that played to packed houses since 2015. Somehow or other, I’ve a feeling we’ll hear more from Waterford’s favourite historian Dr Eugene Broderick at this venue.
The Waterford Chamber Music Festival sold out a glorious weekend in Mount Congreve in July with a packed programme of national and international musicians and the Saturday morning youth concert was a highlight.
The Symphony Club of Waterford (SCOW) continues to host top-class work and their concerts are now filling the huge SETU Arena. It’s a great venue that holds a huge audience and one where parking is never an issue. SCOW also hosted the RIAM Philharmonia, along with the Hibernia Orchestra at Christ Church.
Waterford Music ran a very successful series of concerts at The Large Room.
Notable Works, under the baton of Waterford Musical Director Kevin O’Carroll, bring local, national and international musicians together for large-scale musical works in Waterford, and their Brahms Requiem played to a sold-out attendance at St John’s Church in November.
As always, concerts prove immensely popular. Jack L, Mary Black, Phil Coulter, Sharon Shannon, Clíona Hagan, Mersey Beatles and Iarla O’Lionáird stood out for me. The Theatre Royal is a big and popular venue for these concerts and it’s rare to find a week without one. Omega Three, Madrigallery, The Marmen Quartet, John Finucane and The Far Flung Trio were all top-notch concerts that were well worth the ticket.
It would be nice to see more professional drama in both Garter Lane and the Theatre Royal. Blue Raincoat performed the elaborately mimed ‘Last Pearl’ and our own Keith Dunphy performed the astonishing ‘Word against the Word’ in October.
Theatre Royal hosted Eugene O’Brien’s ‘Heaven’ in March, Pat Kinevane’s ‘Underneath’ and Norma Sheehan’s Wine O’Clock in June, and Imelda May’s ‘Mother of all the Behans’ in August. Phelim Drew remembered his dad Ronnie in ‘Remembering Ronnie’ in early September, along with Michael Harding’s ‘I loved him from the day he died’ later that month.
Lime St. Theatre/Belltable floored Jilly Morgan’s Birthday Party in October and it was a delight to see the Theatre Royal/SETU outreach production of selected scenes and discussion from this year’s Leaving Cert Shakespearean text King Lear hosted by the excellent Edward Denniston.
Amateur drama flourished this year with some powerful performances and productions all over the county. Dunhill Players rolled back the years with memories of Jackie Kennedy’s attendance in 'Many Young Men of Twenty'. Curtain Call floored the grim fate of Ruth Ellis with ‘The Thrill of Love’ and a later comedy with ‘Allo Allo’ at Dungarvan Town Hall.
Brewery Lane Theatre in Carrick are as busy as ever with excellent work such as ‘The Loves of Cass Maguire’ and 'Juno and the Paycock’, while Dungarvan Dramatic had a blockbuster with ‘Macbeth’.
Halla Colmáin hosted Aisteoirí an tSeanphobail’s new play by Declan Terry ‘The Ribbon Road’ and Tramore’s Stagemad produced ‘The Sea Horse Tragedy’ along with five short plays in ‘5 for 25’ at the Coastguard in Tramore.
New dramas from Waterford playwrights continued to the end of the year with Martina Collender’s radio play ‘Still we sing’; ‘Sorry Miscellany’ staged over several floors at Garter Lane 2, as did Derek Flynn’s cliffhanger ‘The Dark Room’.
A chilly May night brought outdoors me to the GOMA Garden for Hannah Carberry’s clever ‘Grasp’, while Niamh Fennessy’s ‘Glue’ brought good houses to the Mall.
Happy Robot Productions returned to Garter Lane with ‘Remember Me’, while pub theatre featured from Turn Around Theatre upstairs at Philly Grimes, Luke Corcoran’s Halloween night at Downes’s and the Portlaw players at the Cotton Mill Portlaw.
Amateur musical theatre is still packing them in. Stage school productions are big affairs and local schools also mount some blockbuster productions with big casts and even bigger audiences. David Hennessy’s ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, TheatreBox’s ‘Six the Musical’, and Soul Dance Arts’ ‘Newsies’ delighted packed houses at Garter Lane. These productions fill me with pride and faith in the future for theatre in Waterford. The casts are tomorrow’s casts and audiences and a sense of community reaches out and wraps its loving arms around these shows.
We had two Addams Family musicals this year – Carrick-on-Suir and Tramore Community Theatre – and an innovative ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’ from David Hennessy.
Jack Cunningham Productions got ‘All Shook Up’ with a string of Elvis hits that any Tops audience would have loved.
It’s not often we see professional dance productions but this year we were blessed with three fabulous productions – the superb ‘Mosh’ from Waterford’s Rachel Ní Bhraonáin, ‘Dances like a Bomb’ from Junk Ensemble and ‘Dance Scratch Night’ curated by artist-in-residence at Garter Lane, Rachel Ní Bhraonáin. Superb.
Shure there’s never anything on in Waterford!
