By now the canon had been tamed: shmooze ruled, and directors would join sponsors and critics in the intervals of their shows for chardonnay and canapes. Breakaway groups showed a more combative approach: with actor-manager Barrie Rutter and his company Northern Broadsides, doing no-nonsense Shakespeare in disused mills in northern accents, refreshingly attacking other productions and firing off indignant letters. Everyone could have a go, say, at a Marxist play by Brecht, and a firm of chartered accountants would probably sponsor it. The National was good at Shakespeare; our national Shakespeare company, the RSC, was good at Chekhov. It was tough for those theatres that weren't within a taxi ride of a sound-recording studio in Soho. Successful directors moved from one theatre to another without fear of artistic compromise, because the house style nearly everywhere was pick 'n' mix. Only eight said they lived in Belfast, a city where possibly the largest number of events of dramatic interest were taking place.
In a decade when nearly everyone's voice was available for hire, the advertising industry, rather than the Arts Council, had become the major subsidiser of British theatre. There's always a dichotomy between art as something on a pedestal, and as something that speaks directly to people.INTERVIEWS BY ROWLAND BYASS, CHARLOTTE EDWARDS, JONATHAN THOMPSON. In 1995, the actors' bible Spotlight came out on CD-Rom. There were 8,000 actors listed, and a quick search showed that 5,000 of them lived in Voice-Over Land, also known as London. I was recently in Pittsburgh and was told by one gallery that they wouldn't show any works featuring nudity - that's a large part of the history of art out of the window, then.Art in the 1990s has become a lot more headline-grabbing. In any case, we forget that even an artist such as David Hockney was, at the beginning, unsettling for a lot of people.
Mayor Giuliani's objection to the "Sensation" exhibition has set a really bad precedent in America. It's certainly a melting pot, which means - thankfully - there's no clear way forward in terms of a music policy for 2000.SAM TAYLOR-WOOD (artist)While Britain has seen an explosion of art, America has taken 20 steps back. Even Britpop, led by Blur, Oasis and Suede, took many of its influences from the American grunge of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. British involvement with music in Ibiza actually began in the late 1980s, with DJs Pete Tong and Danny Rampling, even though it was not until the mid- 1990s that Ibiza became an important cultural influence in the UK.What has really characterised the Nineties is the crossing-over of musical genres.
Ireland became fashionable.JEFF SMITH (head of music, BBC Radio 1)Over the last 10 years, much has happened in music I think it has been a good decade We started off at the nadir of the Soul II Soul sound Stock, Aitken and Waterman still dominated the pop world. Sebastian Barry in particular helped to give it an international authority and influence on a scale that it had not seen since the early days of the Abbey Theatre, 100 years ago.For Ireland, the 1990s will be seen as the breakthrough decade in terms of economic success, international profile and cultural influence. It therefore became experimental, anecdotal and somewhat biographical. Narrative history itself developed in a new way through Norman Davies's books on Europe (including Britain), which experimented with post-modern techniques of assemblage.The 1990s saw an astonishing flowering of Irish theatre. Get you behind me, you damned, matt-black spot!ROY FOSTER (Irish historian )History writing over the last decade reflected the abandonment of the big idea that explains everything. Food, design and other even more tenuous crafts have come to supersede the genuine arts as the repository of cultural aspiration.This was the decade that set out with the threat of being "more caring", yet which has collapsed into being an exaggerated extrapolation of the worst characteristics of the 1980s Decadence - literally as well as metaphorically. It's a momentary connection between the performer and the audience.WILL SELF (writer)Film has become an entirely decadent medium, debauched by its own capacity to suspend disbelief in its audience.
Popular music, in line with the diminuendo of the baby boom, has relapsed into total decadence: an unholy mish-mash of commercially driven productions, which bear no genuine relation to either social revolution or any recognisable youth movement. The beauty of a theatrical production, however, lies in its evanescence. It echoes human existence by lasting only a single moment, existing in memory. It was published just before I began to work with him on Phedre, and I was swept away in the great landslide of his language.All creativity is a contract with the future, but building something, or publishing a collection of poetry, is particularly hopeful - and lasting. Another feature of the 1990s has been the way in which people have gone from the UK and broken into Hollywood, giving it an artistic twist. Stephen Daldry from the Royal Court, for example, has done some very successful producing abroad.JONATHAN KENT (artistic director, Almeida Theatre)The fact that we can build something as beautiful and ambitious as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao at the end of such a blighted century gives me hope for the human race.Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters was the most remarkable flowering of his genius at the end of his life.