On a night in October I sat in a tiny theatre in Temple Bar and watched and listened as ten ordinary men sang a cycle of songs about their lives and Ireland.

When it finished, too soon, the woman beside me said, “You’d have to have a heart of stone not to have liked that,” and she was right.

They were love songs, mostly: about lovers, and love of family, and of country. Untrained and unabashed, this curious choir sang them with an honesty and starkness that would have been confrontational, were they not so gentle.

There were two cellists, and a man playing guitar and keyboards, Seán Miller.

The performance made for an intriguing and elegiac concert; but it was the stories that were sung that made this into the year’s outstanding piece of theatre.

Each of the men was gay, and most of them were over 40, some in their 60s and (I think) 70s. Their songs were about being gay in Ireland, and about being gay from Ireland.

Seán Miller, a singer-songwriter, had spent a year recording interviews with older gay men. He wrote a song cycle inspired by the interviews, and gave that to the young theatre duo, Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan, who call themselves Brokentalkers. The lads recruited a (mostly) amateur choir and, using elements of Miller’s original recordings, and elements of their choir’s own stories, crafted an ensemble performance.

The songs ranged from rural Ireland to San Francisco, and the stories from repression to liberation. One told of the man’s pride at joining the first gay group to march in New York’s St Patrick’s Day parade; another told of a hilarious sexual awakening amongst a Bacchanalian order of monks in Rome.

But the one that echoes still was a song about a young man coming out to his mother, in an Ireland that was then, still, intolerant of difference and in thrall to the church. “I love you more than God,” was her answer to his fears.

Silver Stars, this show was called and, on January 8, it opens at the prestigious off-Broadway venue, the Public, for a week-long run as part of the annual Under the Radar Festival (see www.undertheradarfestival.com), a showcase of international, innovative theatre.

If the parts of Silver Stars seem simple to the point of being untheatrical, then the show was more than their sum. It was a story of Ireland: of the emergence of a new, more confident country from the wreckage of a socially repressive past. It was a story of survivors and solidarity, and it was inspiring.

Silver Stars was also part of a bigger movement in Irish theatre this year, a movement that somehow seems to have acquired the epithet “post-dramatic”.

That may sound more likely to induce stress disorder than theatrical insight, but underneath the jargon lies some sense, at least.

To the post-dramatic way of thinking, “drama” is pretty predictable: an audience files respectfully into a theatre, to watch actors perform a script on stage. There are characters and a plot, and everybody – including the public – knows their roles.

But what happens when you take non-actors and put them on a stage, or take the actors off the stage (or out of the theatre altogether), or tell them not to act? Whatever happens, it’s probably post-dramatic.

A clutch of young theatre makers this year experimented with these ideas, and more.

Some of then were extremely silly, some of them were quietly provocative, some were triumphant. What united them all was not the jargon, but a core idea: theatre makers need to find new ways to connect with audiences.

In the proscenium theatres, drama is dying. Like newspapers, theatre faces a fundamental challenge from new media: like newspapers, there’s no shortage of appetite for its raw product (stories), but there is growing impatience with how it’s delivered.

Theatre needs to be cheaper, shorter, more responsive to what’s happening around it, and more ready to engage with its audience and their stories.

Brokentalkers and Seán Miller know this, and they know, too, that adopting new ideas doesn’t have to mean abandoning old values. After all, there’s nothing post-dramatic about a good story.

The next decade will see more theatre like Silver Stars, and hopefully some of it will be as good, and better.

Written for my weekly theatre column in the Irish Independent.