Ten years ago, the British theatre impresario Michael Kustow issued an impassioned plea for the theatre, in a book with the now quaint title, ‘Theatre@Risk’. Faced with the overwhelming forces of both the internet and global capital, Kustow wondered, would theatre survive?

It seemed for a while during this decade that Irish theatre makers were responding to this challenge by including bits of video in their plays and calling them “multimedia”.

The response may have been glib, but the challenge was real. New media offer genuinely new means of entertainment and social interaction, and the expectations they create – of accessibility, interaction, and real-time response – are poorly met by the cumbersome form of traditional theatre.

But the recipe for the survival of theatre is a simple one. It consists of urgent work, smart innovation, and, crucially, finding ways, through both the work itself and the marketing of it, to bring in new audiences. Reliant on subsidy, Irish theatre has lagged, in particular, at the latter.

But at the end of 2009, there are signs of that changing. A new generation is experimenting aggressively with the art, finding new subjects, new ways to tell stories and new places to tell them.

These are my ten highlights of the decade in theatre, an eclectic list that ranges from plays to companies to individuals. Between them, these were the key forces and events that shaped Irish theatre this decade. And where better to start than with the company that looks set to put its stamp most immediately on the new decade.

1. Brokentalkers’ documentary theatre

Brokentalkers are the emergent wunderkind of Irish theatre and are about to take Manhattan (at the Under the Radar Festival in January) with their recent Dublin theatre festival hit, ‘Silver Stars’. This was an intoxicating piece of both documentary and musical theatre: musician Sean Miller wrote a song cycle based on his interviews with older, gay, Irish men, and Brokentalkers put together a gay men’s choir to sing it, employing some of Miller’s original interview recordings in the gentlest of multimedia touches. The result was a story of modern Ireland, and of the making of America.

2. Druid’s Synge Cycle

Brokentalkers look forward for inspiration, from technology and globalised culture; Garry Hynes looked backwards, and found it, again, in the deep well of drama that is the work of John Millington Synge. Hynes’s staging of all of Synge’s plays in 2005, in the ‘DruidSynge’ cycle – played back to back on key days, over nine hours – was unforgettable, illuminating the plays and magnifying Synge’s greatness.

3. Tom Murphy’s explorations of the Irish psyche

The second year of the decade saw overdue recognition of Tom Murphy at the Abbey, with a five-play retrospective. The final year of the decade saw a powerful new play by Murphy, ‘The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant’, premiere at the Abbey, as well as a vigorous staging of perhaps his greatest play, ‘The Gigli Concert’, by Druid; last year gave us an illuminating production of ‘The Sanctuary Lamp’ by bespoke theatre company. All three plays see him wrestling with darkness, treading the fault lines in the Irish psyche; in the Reluctant Tyrant, he traces those faults most explicitly to their origins in poverty and the land. At decade’s end, he remains our most significant and challenging playwright.

4. The RSC’s Histories Cycle

As Murphy traced the emergence of modern Ireland in a drama of a ruthless matriarch, Shakespeare drew the much earlier emergence of modern England in a series of dramas of ruthless monarchs. All the Henrys and Richards may seem bewildering to Irish audiences, but Belfast man Michael Boyd made gripping sense of them in his Histories cycle for the Royal Shakespeare Company. After two years working with the same ensemble of actors (including Waterford’s Keith Dunphy), he staged eight plays back to back over a weekend, last year, in a 24-hour orgy of battles, betrayal and blood. It was urgent, gripping, innovatively staged. Triumphant.

5. Michael Keegan Dolan’s epic dance theatre

Irish theatre has traditionally been created and performed from the shoulders up, and the 1990s was a decade when an unprecedented array of Irish playwrights found international success. This past decade has seen the rise of alternative voices: directors and collectives forging theatre that is less literary and more collaborative, whose protagonists are as likely to be technology, the environment, or raw, physical bodies as they are well-spoken characters. Michael Keegan Dolan’s Midlands Trilogy was the most striking of these works, bringing dance and ritual to the service of epic theatre, with irreverent wit and great passion.

6. Enda Walsh’s scabrous farce

That cabal of writers who emerged in the mid-to-late 1990s – Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh, Mark O’Rowe, Marina Carr – is now firmly established. With them was Enda Walsh, whose febrile writing first catapulted Cillian Murphy to fame in Disco Pigs. With The Walworth Farce, Walsh gave us the standout new play of this decade. As much tragedy as comedy, this farce was an extraordinarily inventive piece of plotting and writing, given exceptional form in Mikel Murfi’s production for Druid. If at times it exceeded itself in ambition, undermining the full force of the dark drama within, then that merely indicates that there is greater to come from Enda Walsh.

7. Eileen Walsh’s star turns

Cillian Murphy’s co-star in Disco Pigs was an equally mesmerising young actress called Eileen Walsh, and if her career didn’t take off with quite the same stratospheric force as Murphy’s, then more recent years have established her as the foremost Irish actress of her generation. Most recently on stage in Garry Hynes’s production of The Gigli Concert, she has been mesmerising in a series of plays, including Mark O’Rowe’s Terminus and the Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle rewrite of The Playboy of the Western World, in which Walsh gave us a memorably foul-mouthed, emotionally stunted, despairing, beautiful Pegeen Mike.

8. Bisi Adigun’s challenge to the canon

Bisi Adigun has been the most sustained and successful of those attempting to reflect Irish demographic change in the theatre. His Arambe theatre company has sought to fuse African and Irish theatre, and his inspired version of Jimmy Murphy’s Irish emigrant play, The Kings of the Kilburn High Road, with Nigerian and Nigerian-Irish actors, was a seminal moment, more telling even than his very successful version of The Playboy, written with Roddy Doyle, which saw the playboy recast as a Nigerian seeking refuge in a suburban pub. Another force relentlessly probing the tensions and possibilities of demographic change has been Dermot Bolger, in particular in his ambitious and moving Ballymun Trilogy.

9. The Gate’s 32-county touring

It is difficult to single out the key moment in the decade for the Gate: would it be acclaim in New York for its production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, with Ralph Fiennes? Or opening the new wing? Or celebrating its 80th anniversary? Or running a Pinter festival coincident with Pinter’s winning the Noble Prize? On stage, the highlight was Pinter’s No Man’s Land. But in terms of ambition, last year’s 32-county, 40-night tour of Waiting for Godot was particularly inspired and inspirational.

10. The Abbey’s re-emergence

The Abbey has had a difficult decade: like the banks, it took a government bailout to rescue it from bankruptcy; and even as it has dragged itself out of that mire, under Fiach Mac Conghail’s direction, the economic crisis has put its supposed relocation in doubt, and forced a scaling back of ambition. The Gate and Druid have had more impact internationally in recent years, but the Abbey has done good, quieter work, fostering Irish playwriting and directing talent and looking to the States, in particular, for new influences. With the centenary of the Rising fast approaching, the Abbey will be looked to both to memorialise and question that legacy. That could make it the prime force in Irish theatre in this coming decade.

Written for the Irish Independent’s Review of the Decade, January 31, 2009