Cultural highlights 2025: Rhys as Burton, Lennon & Yoko, Celtic links and Tudur Owen

Ant Evans

To say that 2025 has been something of a whirlwind would be an understatement. I found myself feeling quite daunted when this year’s request for highlights landed in my inbox.

That being said, there is one event this year which stands out. That is when I was lucky enough to watch and review comedian Tudur Owen’s first stage play, Huw Fyw, at Galeri in Caernarfon in the spring.

Huw Fyw centres around the life of seventy three year old Huw, played by the playwright himself, and those he comes into contact with during the course of his daily life (whether he likes it or not). Set in 1995, the play has already taken its audience thirty years into the past, though we are occasionally transported to the 1940s.

Many themes are touched upon here, including drug use, survivors’ guilt and PTSD, each of which are treated sensitively.

Interactions between characters, be they humorous or conflicting in nature, are portrayed with immense skill by the cast, leading to an immersive theatrical experience throughout.

In addition, the use of sound effects (such as the lottery draw theme or an oven alarm) only brings the world of Huw Fyw to life further.

Another vital way in which immersion is strengthened from my perspective, as a partially sighted audience member, was accessibility. This included a touch tour of the set before the performance and Welsh language audio description, which was incredibly helpful, especially during one scene where a character arrives on set silently. I very much hope that more theatrical productions will incorporate these features for disabled theatre goers.

I was very pleased indeed to read recently that Huw Fyw would be touring again in 2026. I’d very much encourage you to attend your nearest performance.

Gaynor Funnell

Watching Mathew Rhys play Richard Burton was a highlight that will last a lot longer than this year.

Funny, tear-jerkily sad, informative, peppered with quotes from Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, Mark Jenkins play was as superb as Rhys was remarkable, Rhys well deserving of the standing ovation he received.

The fact that my sister and I managed to speak briefly to him afterwards was the icing on top of the proverbial Christmas cake.

Among the many books I’ve read this year, three stand out. Anthony Shapland’s A Room Above A Shop, is a poignant, unforgettable story set in south Wales valleys in the 1980’s.

It details the growing relationship between two men, set against the background of the HIV and AIDS crisis. Although a relatively short book, it’s full of images, of memories, of love, of fear, of shadow and light.

In Birdland, A Journey Around Britain on the Wing, Jon Gower, shows us, the reader, the art of paying attention to birds, and how diminished we would be without them.

He travels around the UK in search of specific birds, including the curlew, corncrake, Manx shearwater, the turtle dove.

His writing is insightful, sometimes humorous, and although conservation is a constant, and rightly so, the joy of seeing, hearing, and believing in birds is the books over-arching theme, a celebration, in fact.

To say that Rob Cowen’s book The North Road, is about travelling along the North road, the 400 miles of the A1, the ‘backbone’ of Britian, would be naïve, ridiculous even.

It is an extraordinary story, greater than the sum of all its very detailed parts – memoir, history, people, time, ghosts, songs – with a side path of fiction.

I’ve never read anything quite like it before. An archaeological dig is the catalyst for his walking, ‘Go stir the ground and see what comes up’, he writes. ‘It is about finding the road that may bring us home.’

Richard John Parfitt

Just finished Jonathan Ames third instalment in the ‘Doll’ series: Karma Doll – about a pot smoking Buddhist ex cop with an acquired new face courtesy of a disgraced plastic surgeon.

Doll spends the pandemic hiding out stoned and hanging with his dog George, but after witnessing a murder he gets mixed up with two killers hellbent on tracking him down.

Doll’s violent nature and consequently the karmic blowback, provide the interior tension.

It’s a hilarious, compulsive, fast paced joyride through the glitzy dark underworld of Los Angeles via Mexico, with a raw prose style that at times recalls Jim Thompson reflecting on the Dalai Lama.

Co-directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice Edwards, One to One: John & Yoko documents the period 1971 – 1972, focussing on Lennon’s political awakening and culminating in a charity concert in aid of a state-run institute for children with mental disabilities.

Yoko and John were both scandalised by the abuse suffered by the children at Willowbrook State, and as such, their set leans heavily into the socio political with songs that includes: Power to the People, Born in A Prison, Imagine, etc.

Throughout the film Macdonald and Rice Edwards skillfully weave in a rush of ads, news reports and vox pops, so that the finished movie comes across less like a nostalgia fest and more like someone channel surfing the zeitgeist.

This method, interspersed with John and Yoko’s televisual bed-in, highlights just how counter cultural mainstream rock was back in the 70s.

There are so many music docs available to stream right now but to my mind this is a stand out original. Ten years between the release of Love me Do [1962] and Woman is the N–r of the World [1972] shows how supersonic Lennon’s political and musical evolution was.

The Tubs’ Cotton Crown has already been lauded by the likes of Mojo, Pitchfork and the Guardian, and reminds me of how endlessly re-inventive guitar music can be.

The cover art is a photo of the late Charlotte Greig, folk singer, novelist, and mother to The Tubs’ singer/songwriter, Owen O Williams.

And while some of the songs pay tribute to her, the tone is never bleak but fused with a joyous and positive energy: ‘At the wake, someone took my arm / Said that you could write a song to honour your mum’ [Strange].

Over the course of nine songs Williams’ unique vocal lends itself to a kind of a bucolic punk rock that evokes Hüsker Dü, R.E.M., and the arpeggiated guitar picking of Johnny Marr, while at the same time managing to sound like none of them and present as something original.

Myles Pepper

So, we are in the 30th year of cultural exchanges with music groups, writers, composers and visual artists from the South East of Ireland and north Pembrokeshire, and the high point of the year must be our Simffoni Mara Trio’s trip Wexford, Carrig on Bannow and Waterford.

It has been my life-long ambition to create long term sustainable links which, in theory, should now carry on developing.

The Simffoni Mara Trio began the weekend by visiting the Danescastle School in Carrig on Bannow, the nerve centre of our cultural relations.

This is a First Level school with circa 170 on the register yet every Friday evening the school becomes the training and practising centre for the Danescastle Music Group with an incredible 250 youngsters learning traditional Irish music.

We spent the early part of the day there being entertained by all age groups and then the Simffoni Mara Trio performed for the pupils. In between times we went out on location with filmmaker Connor Malone to gather material which will be featured in a series of new music commissions from Dan Jones and David Pepper.

On the Saturday we held a concert in Wexford town, at St. Iberius Church, which is where we staged our first joint concert 30 years ago.

The occasion brought musicians back together, some who hadn’t performed for many a year so for the Simffoni mara Trio to perform alongside 120 Traditional Irish musicians the scene was set for the most memorable of concerts.

The weekend concluded for the trio with a series of short performances as part of Holy Eucharist in Christ Church Cathedral, Waterford, with whom we have also had a relationship for many a year.

Their Organist and Master of Music, Simon Harden, will pay another performance visit to north Pembrokeshire next year, as will the Danescastle School when a tour of churches is being planned, alongside walks and talks in the surrounding countryside, the launch of this initiative again being one of this year’s success stories and highlights.

Summing it all up I guess it’s the realisation of the celebration of our land and culture /cultural landscape that is abounded with beauty but rarely, thus far, celebrated with real and deep purpose, something that we could learn a lot from the Irish…… we are out of the starting blocks!