Welcome to Wales Arts Review’s Best of 2021! Over the last two weeks we have been nominating our top Welsh art and cultural offerings from throughout the year. We’re now excited to reveal our favourites from each category — read on for our 2021 number ones.
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The Betty Campbell Monument by Eve Shepherd
What we said: “It is a monument, because although it pays tribute and commemorates the influence and personality of a remarkable individual woman, it also speaks of wider values and aspirations, and it speaks of the society all decent people would hope we could be. It is great art, but perhaps more importantly, it is great public art.”
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Il tabarro (Mid Wales Opera)
What we said: “Mid Wales Opera continues to do sterling work in creating nights at the opera both for those who love it but can’t get to it and those who can get to it and can’t get enough of it. The company’s brand of high professionalism is not to be reduced.”
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FOW (Deaf & Fabulous Productions and Taking Flight Theatre Company)
What we said: “FOW works as a highly entertaining, low-fi — albeit undemanding — rom-com that might find a bigger audience on a channel such as BBC3 or E4. Its considerable achievement, though, is to present the ways in which we isolate others when we fail to engage intelligently and compassionately with their language, and what we lose when we do so. ”
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Astro Tough by Audiobooks
What we said: “Audiobooks’ second album, Astro Tough, is so great, it shows up the shortfalls of the debut very starkly indeed. Even if I wasn’t really sure where or why or if Now! (in a minute) had plenty of shortcomings, I am now certain of its place as the awkward fumbling foreplay to the earth-shaking YES YES YES of Astro Tough.”
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The Short Knife by Elen Caldecott (Andersen Press)
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In My Skin (Series Two) (TV, BBC)
What we said: “In everything from its writing to its acting to its production, In My Skin is layered with intelligence… To watch In My Skin is to be transported to its small and richly textured world. Any critic is loathe to fall back on comments as banal as “moving” and “absorbing” — yet In My Skin seems to demand them.”
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Easy Meat by Rachel Trezise (Parthian)
What we said: “Easy Meat is a novel that orbits Brexit, but in the same way that the referendum came to symbolise more than leaving the European Union, it is not about it… This is a novel about grief, poverty, and how the disparate struggles of individuals in a society can impact that society in dramatic ways.”
