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A few things I’ve enjoyed in 2024.

Play of the year

Robert Icke’s retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus, at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End, was spellbinding from first moment to last. You know what’s going to happen yet it pulses with the tense energy of a political thriller. Hitting the same heights as Icke’s masterful Oresteia from 2015, the considered and dynamic production is brought home by captivating performances from Mark Strong and Lesley Manville.

Album of the year

The long-anticipated return of The Cure with Songs of a Lost World made me feel both old and young. Young as it hurled me back 35 years to playing Disintegration on the day of release, Robert Smith’s intonation unchanged, the layered guitars and synths bridging the years. And old because this is a dispatch from the edge of the abyss, a meditation on death and dying to sit with Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker.

Books of the year

With Come and Get It Kiley Reid built on the promise of her debut Such a Fun Age, delivering a freewheeling campus novel that skewers the power dynamics of money, race and class. David Peace’s Munichs also lived up to expectations, meticulously recreating the days following the 1958 Munich air disaster. Of the older novels I read in 2024, the standout was Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, driving her Regeneration trilogy to its heart-shattering conclusion.

Song of the year

I loved ‘The Feminine Urge’ by The Last Dinner Party, from their excellent debut album Prelude to Ecstasy. A heart-pounding chorus that turns out to have been only a pre-chorus for an even more ridculously catchy skyscraping refrain. Music that takes you out of yourself, creating a moment out of time.

Here’s to more such moments in 2025.

Three plays made a special connection with me this year: The Wild Duck at the Almeida, Girls & Boys at the Royal Court, and the Young Vic’s West End production of The Inheritance (I missed the original run).

Robert Icke’s radical adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck proved once again his alchemic ability to conjure drama out of thin air. What begins as an arm’s-length study of the source text becomes a powerfully engrossing, and significantly unresolved, battle between two opposing philosophies: truth at all costs and the ‘life lie’.

Equally breathtaking was Denis Kelly’s Girls & Boys. Driven by Carey Mulligan’s charmingly brutal, deeply multifaceted performance, this play about the fallout of thwarted masculinity draws you in to rip you apart. You quickly sense the dark place it’s taking you to but you can’t turn away.

From a cast of one to a consummate ensemble, Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance is an expansive, touching study of a generation of gay New Yorkers living in the long shadow of the AIDS crisis. The play glides effortlessly from the personal to the political throughout its two impressively self-contained parts.

Inspired by EM Forster’s Howard’s End, The Inheritance curiously shares with Icke’s The Wild Duck a manner of making up the show from scratch and subjecting it to continued scrutiny, along with a critical attitude towards its originator. Just as Ibsen’s motives in creating The Wild Duck are called into question, so Forster is challenged for suppressing his own sexuality. In both cases the metatextual moves are elegant rather than showy, and deepen our understanding.

I must also mention Arinzé Kene’s Misty and debbie tucker green’s ear for eye, two more plays to round out my top five of the year.

Kene’s lyrical triumph is a provoking exploration of what it means to be ‘a black play’ that never forgets to entertain, as well as enlighten, its audience. Meanwhile the hotly anticipated ear for eye delivered a poetic, scathing account of the many layers of prejudice suffered by black Britons and Americans.

Speaking of which, my final highlight of the year was Fabia Turner’s smart and insightful review of this important play. Read Fabia Turner’s review of ear for eye here.