The end of the first series of Kin found Dublin’s Kinsella crime family ridding themselves of bloodsucking drug baron Eamon Cunningham, but this was not an unalloyed blessing. As this second series opens, the Kinsellas are having to make new arrangements with the Batuks, the Turkish family who are the source of all the local drug supplies. Snag is, the Turks want the Kinsellas to repay Cunningham’s outstanding debt to them of €70m.

Folklore tends to depict Dublin as a convivial and picturesque city, with a bar on every corner full of revellers on wild stag weekends, but that’s not what we find in Kin. This is a chilly, menacing Dublin, full of modern but charmless architecture and gripped by organised crime.

Promising on paper, dazzling in practice: with a superlative soloist and conductor, this programme just soared on wings of philosophy-into-music. The spotlighting of NSO co-leader Elaine Clark provided another thread, from the opening chant of Linda Buckley‘s Fall Approaches through the keen dialogues with collegial Baiba Skride in Bernstein’s dazzling Serenade to the Viennese-waltz Dance Song of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra.

Is Gounod’s Faust really a “complex and multi-layered work”, as director Jack Furness claims? Goethe’s original and Berlioz’s Damnation, absolutely; this tuneful concoction, half light opera, half kitsch melodrama, not so much. If Furness’s take leads him to concept overload, as well as quite a few really strong ideas, the big strength here lies in the casting of three world-class singers in the eternal triangle of rake, seduceable innocent and devil.

Church and law are enemies of promise in Ibsen’s tragedy-without-catharis. You can see why this devastating attack on, among other things, the syphilitic sins of the fathers being visited on the hopeful young created a ruckus in the 1880s. It’s still potent thanks to the characters’ complex reactions to social constraints. Mark O’Rowe’s new version for Landmark Productons at the Abbey is faithful to the essence, while sets and costumes only reinforce modernity in period dress.

Who’d have thought Florence Price, Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Brahms would all fit the (unspoken) theme of 1930s America? Brahms made the bill by virtue of Schoenberg’s 1937 arrangement of the C minor Piano Quartet, so outlandish and camp that you’d be tempted to credit Stokowski as the orchestrator. Like Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on the Theme of Paganini, it needs vertiginous audacity: that came in spades from conductor Joshua Weilerstein and pianist Martin James Bartlett.

This Palm Sunday served up an epiphany. Previous encounters with Handel's Messiah, in whatever version, and whether listening or performing, turned out to have been through a glass darkly. And here we were face to face with undiluted genius, served with total consistency by 26 musicians running the gamut from intimacy through fury to great blazes, all guided by the extraordinary spirit of IBO artistic director Peter Whelan.

U2 are better than their many critics make out. Their Stakhanovite work ethic in creating huge sonics, not-a-bolt-out-of-place songwriting and stagecraft that could reach every corner of the biggest venues long before the days of giant LED screens made them the biggest band in the world with good reason. Bono Vox’s “Marmite personality” was also a big part of that: it pretty much requires a messiah complex to work that hard to reach that many people.  

Commuting between London and Dublin has its fascinations.10 days ago, I saw for the first time at the Southwark Playhouse’s Elephant Theatre, heart in mouth during most of it, Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, his first Edinburgh Festival Fringe First winner in 2007. Then to Dublin’s Gate Theatre last night for its immediate successor in the Walsh canon and 2008 Edinburgh triumph, The New Electric Ballroom.

A pot plant on a stand, two tables with glasses of water, two chairs – one plush, one high – are all the props needed on the stage of the Abbey’s second theatre, the Peacock, for the ultimate complete reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses in its 100th year. For Barry McGovern is a master: one of Beckett’s favourite actors, on a par with Billie Whitelaw, and immersed in all things Joycean over the past 30 years (★★★★★).