AWAY from my home city of Manchester, this year I greatly enjoyed the colour and form of the wonderful New Times, New Pleasures exhibition of Fernand Leger’s work at Tate Liverpool and the new insights provided by Van Gogh in Britain at Tate Britain earlier in the year.

There was a great musical treat in the capital from the superb The Gloaming at the Union Chapel, a showcase of Irish traditional music at its very best. The band create an unusual sound by the harmonising of fiddle, guitar and piano with an overlay from the haunting voice of the exceptional Iarla O Lionaird.

For sheer spectacle it was hard to beat the version of the opera Carmen I saw in the ancient Roman arena in Verona.

It was a phenomenal experience to sit high up on the stone steps listening to the enchanting music from Bizet and, interestingly, Argentinian director Hugo de Ana reset the action to 1930s Spain, where Carmen’s unfolding tragedy foretold the horror about to befall the Spanish Republic.

On my own turf, Manchester’s theatres continued to deliver astonishing, exciting, thoughtful and insightful shows. The Royal Exchange’s brilliantly funny production of Mel Brooks’s The Producers brought 2018 to a magnificent close while kicking 2019 off in a riot of song, dance and laughter.  

Other highlights of the year were Pooja Ghai’s splendid reworking of Harold Brighouse’s early 20th-century classic Hobson’s Choice, with Atri Banerjee’s production shining the spotlight on the generational and gender tensions within the Asian community in Manchester.

With the growth of precarious employment, the Royal Exchange’s excellent reimagining of the Luddite Rebellion was both timely and pertinent to the battles ahead but the year’s outstanding theatre production was the world premiere of Manchester playwright David Judge’s one-man show SparkPlug at HOME.

A beautifully simple and heartwarming play about race, gender, fatherhood and love, it was delivered with grace and humility by Judge himself. Truly inspirational — let’s hope that next year Manchester will similarly rise to the challenge and ensure that great productions are at the heart of the city’s life.