We need this beating heart

In many ways the past year has been an annus horribilis - there were fewer champagne corks popping in the boardrooms, jobs became scarcer and property prices took a nose dive. But the arts always seem to thrive in hard times and Auckland's theatre scene has been booming.

The Auckland Festival emphatically established itself as a world-class event, blockbuster touring shows have been running extended seasons at our major venues, the Auckland Theatre Company reported a bumper year at the box office and the constantly mutating pool of small companies supplied the yeast to keep the theatre brew fizzing with an eclectic grab bag of innovative and challenging shows.

There would be several viable contenders for production of the year ranging from ATC's hugely popular revival of The Pohutakawa Tree, through to a taut, small-scale production of August Strindberg's explosive psychological drama The Creditors.

But my pick would be Peach Theatre's production of The History Boys at the Maidment Theatre. Allan Bennet's highly sophisticated script was approached with a naive Kiwi-can-do optimism, giving the whole production the kind of freshness and vitality which makes live theatre so uniquely rewarding.

For new work by New Zealand playwrights, Vivienne Plumb led the field with ATC's sumptuously visual production of The Wife Who Spoke Japanese in Her Sleep at the Maidment. This was followed up by a studio presentation of Oyster _ an elegant mediation on the randomness of youth culture presented as part of the Young and Hungry Festival at the Basement.

However, some of the most exciting local drama was not script-driven. With Ooh Baby Baby at the Town Hall Concert Chamber, Co. Theatre Physical gave birth to a spectacular amalgam of tumbling and aerial pyrotechnics that was both raucously funny and deeply moving.

In a similar vein, Apollo 13 Mission Control at the Aotea Centre took interactive theatre to a new level as audiences were swept along by a wave of nerdy energy that felt like an enthusiastic teenager had got carried away with an ever-expanding science project.

Out of an impressive crop of international shows, the Sam Mendes-directed Bridge Project stood out like a colossus. A legendary director at the peak of his powers and a stellar cast delivered stunning interpretations of one of Shakespeare's seldom produced late plays (The Winter's Tale) and a Chekov classic (The Cherry Orchard).

Live theatre doesn't get much better than this and The Edge pulled off a coup in securing the show which only played in six cities around the world. Unfortunately, the performances - which were under-written by Auckland City Council - ran at a loss exacerbated by poor attendances for an excellent Australian production of My Fair Lady.

The affair brought on a bout of finger pointing from various self-appointed guardians of rate-payer funds. This, in turn, fed into Rodney Hide's dream of a Super City that would focus on the core business of pumping sewage and avoid wasting public money on frivolous pursuits like the arts.

The vision from the man in the canary jacket has a hollow ring, a faint whiff of hypocrisy given that he has spent recent years raving to the women's magazines about how his life was transformed by his own brush with the arts in Dancing With the Stars for TVNZ.

Here's hoping the Super City will bring forth a leader with genuine vision who understands that building a thriving cultural life requires the same kind of investment that is being poured into motorways.

And who knows - the cargo shed on Queens Wharf could be replaced with a Sydney-style opera house.