The Year That Was

In London Evanna Lynch, 14, from Drogheda, Co. Louth won the coveted role of Luna Lovegood, the decidedly odd young witch in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix because, as she says herself, no one else could have played her right.

Lynch spent six months filming in England, and then returned to Ireland to complete her Junior Certificate exam in June. Not surprisingly, she admits that it was difficult to focus on her studies while she was hanging out with the Potter cast and having a ball on the set. Happily for her though, the critics raved about her performance, calling her the best thing in the film.

Last year reminded us once again that the stories the Irish tell about themselves are almost always better than the ones told about them by others. For one thing, they're usually very much harsher than the soft focus, sentimental tales we have inspired in generations of Hollywood scriptwriters.

For proof of this you need look no further than the Tinseltown gloss that was thrown over Cecelia Ahern's bracingly unsentimental tale P.S. I Love You. Making her debut as a romantic heroine, Academy Award winner Hilary Swank gave her all to a difficult role, but in the end she was upstaged by the floodtide of sentiment that overwhelms the film's final reels. The scenes set in Ireland unfold in the amber light of a beer commercial, and what might have been a simple tale well told was mired in layers of romantic suds.

Irish theater productions both here and in Ireland produced exceptional new plays like The Revenant, a new work by Pat McCabe (author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto), which the Druid Theatre Company premiered at the Galway Arts Festival this fall. Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre's production of Irish American author Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited was another provocative night out, creating controversy during its brief run at the Galway fest.

Here in the U.S. the Irish Repertory Theatre's 20th season was artistically one of its strongest ever. Boasting the American premiere of John B. Keane's landmark play Sive, the Irish Rep's stage provided a suitable home for the bravura performace of Fiona Toibin.

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Nster.com