Bacchae and the beast

Some performances were worthy of bouquets, others warranted brickbats. Chitra Ramaswamy on the fortunes of Scots theatre, visual arts and dance.

THEATRE

CRACKERS

The only problem with producing a piece of theatre as perfect as Black Watch is that we immediately start casting our beady eyes around for the next one. As John Tiffany's masterpiece marched on Stateside in its domination of the world, we pinned our hopes on the National Theatre of Scotland's next flagship project, this time opening at the Edinburgh International Festival instead of the Fringe.

Okay, so The Bacchae didn't come close but it did boast Alan Cumming's first Scottish stage appearance in 16 years, as a bottom-baring Dionysus, a black gospel choir as the chorus of Bacchae, and a top-notch translation by David Greig, who gets our award for the Mark Ronson of theatre 2007 (he was everywhere). The Bacchae may have lacked dramatic tension, but it was bold and bitchy and bling, showing a confidence in Scottish theatre that continues apace.

On a no less significant scale, Tony Kushner's 'gay fantasia', Angels In America, in a co-production by the Citz, Lyric Hammersmith and Headlong Theatre, was my personal highlight of the year. As this paper's theatre critic, Mark Fisher, put it: "Daniel Kramer's brilliant staging with a flawless cast of eight compels you to savour every minute." Considering the two-parter came in at a whopping seven hours, that's saying something.

Elsewhere, Vanishing Point's Subway was beautifully directed by Matthew Lenton, featuring a stellar performance from Sandy Grierson and haunting live music by a Kosovan band, while Venus As A Boy, which started its journey in Orkney at the St Magnus Festival before moving on to the Edinburgh Festival and Glasgay!, was another top draw.

Strangely, the year was bookended by new Scottish musicals, which surely doesn't happen often, beginning with the brilliant Sunshine On Leith, featuring songs by the Proclaimers, and ending with the ludicrously silly The Sundowe, which opened the revamped Eden Court Theatre and was one of the major events of Highland 2007.

TURKEYS

THE TOMMY SHERIDAN CHAT SHOW

Oh dear. We never expected biting satire or chat show host skills to make Parkinson blush but we still hoped there might be some entertainment value in giving Tommy's ego a stage of its own. Sadly, this Festival show was bland at best, embarrassing at worst.

FUTUROLOGY: A GLOBAL REVUE

The large-scale work from Suspect Culture and the National Theatre of Scotland, which imagined a UN conference on climate change, split the critics. We branded it "a novel and entertaining piece of theatre that deserves to be seen", but elsewhere it was panned for having less impact than, well, a UN conference on climate change.

HALF LIFE

The first collaboration between NVA and the National Theatre of Scotland was set to be one of the arts events of the year. An ambitious landscape work opening up the extraordinary history of Kilmartin Glen, culminating in an outdoor theatre performance in a forest, what could go wrong? Unfortunately, there were mumblings about the production being slight and the work relying too much on the landscape.

VISUAL ART

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Best exhibition of the year had to be the Andy Warhol retrospective, for perfectly marrying the classicism of Edinburgh's National Gallery with the iconography of pop art. Even the Campbells soup cans encasing the columns outside the gallery were a triumph. The decision to theme Warhol's work under titles as illuminating as 'Death and Disaster', and 'War, Death and Religion' introduced us to work we thought we knew everything about all over again, while the Silver Clouds installation transformed us into awe-struck, balloon-chasing children.

It was the year of the big-name exhibition. Picasso took over the capital with two in-depth shows at the Dean and the National Museum, and William Blake, Richard Long, Joan Eardley and Sir Basil Spence all got major, acclaimed exhibitions.

Nathan Coley was surely the Scottish artist of the year, with an excellent exhibition at doggerfisher in Edinburgh during the Festival, followed by a Turner nomination. Our visual art critic, Iain Gale, raved about Coley's Edinburgh show, saying "his site-specific threshold piece was the Festival's simplest yet most effective artwork".

Moyna Flannigan, my favourite Scottish artist, also wowed the critics with her show at Mount Stuart, in which she replaced paintings in the stately home with her own, creating new dialogues between older work and her twisted, haunting, Goya-inspired art.

Glasgow artist Alex Pollard's first major exhibition since representing Scotland at the 2005 Venice Biennale – at Talbot Rice – explored the image of the clown and was another winner.

TURKEYS

The Six Cities Design festival cost £3m and took place across all the Scottish cities, but was anyone else left feeling that they didn't really know what it was, where it was happening, and whether it was any good? It may have brought us Peacocks Among The Ruins, the Timorous Beasties show at DCA, but otherwise it seemed to sink without a trace.

Glasgow had a quiet year in visual art. After a disappointing show by Katy Dove and Victoria Morton at Tramway, construction work got under way at one of the city's greatest arts spaces to make way for Scottish Ballet, while the CCA's programme was, for a second year running, underwhelming. The Modern Institute fared better, with exhibitions from Martin Boyce and Scott Myles.

Iain Gale branded Roddy Buchanan's GOMA show "one of the most significant Scottish artistic achievements of the past few decades: a Clydeside Guernica, bathed in blood and bigotry but rooted, at last, in hope". But it seemed to me to be lacking in substance and what was there could have been much more slick in its presentation. Mind you, I suppose Glasgow did get Kylie at Kelvingrove...

DANCE

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It's been a strong year in dance, thanks largely to Scottish Ballet. The company's spring season opened with Balanchine's technically tricksy Agon, showing the troupe off at their sultriest and most stylish, while Ashley Page's Olivier-nominated Room Of Cooks was delightfully weird and beautifully danced.

But the feather in Scottish Ballet's cap came with the company's first outside commission under Page. Stephen Petronio's Ride The Beast, which premiered at the Festival, was a thrilling piece of modern dance, full of dynamism and swagger and set to music by Radiohead. I also loved Scottish Dance Theatre's Sorry For The Missiles!, an intense expression of the impact of war, which revealed young choreographer Vanessa Haska as one to watch.

TURKEYS

Expectations were high for On Danse at Jonathan Mills' inaugural International Festival, and not just because of that image of a virtual elephant negotiating a tightrope on the programme. But the exuberant court ballet from Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu, mixing different forms of dance with surreal projections of cherubs and exotic animals, was, for me, sensory overload.

WISHFUL THINKING

He's the SNP's most famous supporter, returns to Edinburgh for the Festival anyway, and he's retired from movies. What could be more fitting than Sir Sean headlining the National Theatre's Festival play nextyear?