Happy New Year for anniversaries…

Now that the mince pies and party hats have been put away for another year, and the papers have stopped looking back over the past year and start looking ahead to the coming one instead, Michael Coveney has noticed in The Observer today, “The most popular melody in the arts world this year is obviously going to be the ‘Anniversary Waltz’. The Royal Court, Mozart, Beckett and even Jackanory are all prompting party invitations and nostalgia jags that should have us reaching for the headache pills by the start of April.”

Everyone, as we’ve just lived through, loves an excuse – any excuse – to throw a party, and one of the most sought-after of all industry invitations have just been sent out for The Stage’s own annual jamboree, that cleverly doesn’t clash with the onslaught of Christmas events but welcomes the new year instead every year. But as Michael has noted above, there are several more formal anniversaries being registered this year, with the Royal Court marking the 50th year of the English Stage Company being established there and the centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth being celebrated in a festival at the Barbican. There’s also another Michael didn’t note: the centenary of Ibsen’s death.

Ibsen was probably the playwright of the year last year – with brilliant productions of Hedda Gabler, Pillars of the Community and The Wild Duck in London – and a festival is also being set up to commemorate him this year. The Ibsen UK 2006 Festival, subtitled “Sex, Suicide and the City”, is aiming to bring “together an outstanding selection of international theatre companies… to celebrate his legacy and demonstrate the contemporary relevance of his work.”

It was under this Festival’s banner that I was invited last month to host a platform at the National’s Lyttelton, with a panel that featured playwright and Ibsen translator Christopher Hampton, director John Barton, actress Lesley Manville and writer Bonnie Greer. Now, blowing my own trumpet for the new year, I am hosting another platform at the National this coming Friday (January 6) specifically on Pillars of the Community, for which I will be joined by its director Marianne Elliott and translator Samuel Adamson (who is also busy at the National at the moment in rehearsals for his own original play, Southwark Fair, that Nick Hytner is directing for a Cottesloe opening next month).