Dublin Theatre Festival

Poor, at Dublin Theatre Festival, is a show destined to keep returning and keep selling out

Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: Katriona O’Sullivan’s memoir becomes a crowd-pleasing play starring Aisling O’Mara and Hollie Lawlor

The God and His Daughter, at Dublin Theatre Festival, has plenty of classical lamentation but not enough Marina Carr

Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: Second part of Marina Carr’s reworking of Sophocles’ Theban plays has plenty of lamentation but not enough Carr

Marina Carr’s The Boy, at Dublin Theatre Festival, asks us to look unflinchingly at the world we have made

Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: Version of the Oedipal myth distinguishes itself with unique Irish sense of fatalism and wit

The Quiet Man, at Dublin Theatre Festival, gets bogged down as it tries some reverse Paddywhackery

Dublin Theatre Festival 2025 review: John Breen and Mikel Murfi set out to reclaim the short story that became John Ford’s John Hinde vision of Ireland

The Sound Inside, at Dublin Theatre Festival, is a play of haunting power

Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: Madeleine Potter and Eric Sirakian shine in Adam Rapp’s Tony-nominated story

I Fall Down, at Dublin Theatre Festival, is joyful, considered and very funny

Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: Gina Moxley’s ‘restoration comedy’ frankly contemplates women’s erasure in the official history of art

Playwright Carys D Coburn on Bán: ‘Can we be real to one another and be family? Often the answer is no’

Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: Coburn’s prowess is in addressing the space between what we say and what we know

This Hamlet, the opening show of Dublin Theatre Festival 2025, is both deeply serious and a riot of fun

Dublin Theatre Festival 2025 review: Teatro La Plaza’s questioning production is performed by a cast with Down syndrome

‘This was not the way my parents grew up. People were not proud of their deaf children’

Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: Her Father’s Voice, Shane O’Reilly’s new play, tackles cochlear implants and attitudes to the deaf community

Rébecca Chaillon: ‘Black women in theatre, I don’t see them. Maybe they are cleaning the toilets’

One of French theatre’s greatest risk-takers is bringing her play Whitewashing to Dublin Theatre Festival 2025

Derry Girls’ Saoirse-Monica Jackson: ‘Dyslexia shaped me. I’m always thinking two steps ahead’

The Derry Girls star on life after the Channel 4 hit; her marriage to Hector Barbour, aka DJ Denis Sulta; and how dyslexia has shaped her

Hamlet starring actors with Down syndrome: ‘It profoundly reconfigures the meaning of to be or not to be?’

Chela De Ferrari is bringing a new vision of Shakespeare’s play to Dublin

The Guide: Dublin Theatre Festival, Dermot Kennedy, Stand Up for Gaza and the other best things to see in Ireland

September 20th-26th, 2025: The best movies, music, art and more coming your way this week

Katriona O’Sullivan on bringing Poor to the stage: ‘I’ve cried so many times, because it’s my life. It’s difficult to watch’

Poor is about to open at the Gate. Its author and playwright Sonya Kelly talk about adapting O’Sullivan’s bestselling memoir for the theatre

Marina Carr and Caitríona McLaughlin on The Boy: ‘We’re constantly being told what to do, what to think. We’ll turn into zombies’

Dublin Theatre Festival 2025: The writer and director on their new production, a retelling of Sophocles’ Theban plays

Pea Dinneen: ‘Raising Her Voice was born out of frustration at seeing myself reflected nowhere in the Irish theatrical canon’

The trans artist Pea Dinneen’s Dublin Fringe Festival debut, an autobiographical show about gender, is also a reclamation of cultural space

A Druid show and a sandwich for 50p: How Mick Lally, Marie Mullen and Garry Hynes began their theatre company 50 years ago

‘We were chancing our arm,’ Garry Hynes says of the company that brought superlative, expansive, intimate, skilled theatre to Galway and then the world stage

Samuel Beckett vs Archbishop McQuaid: Why an infuriated Nobel laureate withdrew his play from Dublin Theatre Festival

Festival acquired letter playwright wrote to friend in 1958 to apologise for feeling compelled to cancel planned run of Act without Words I

Druid Theatre to mark 50th anniversary with Synge-Shakespeare double bill

Presentation in Galway this summer will feature Riders to the Sea and Macbeth

Tommy Tiernan to star in new Kevin Barry play as part of Abbey programme

New slate will also feature Marina Carr’s The Boy, and work from Barbara Bergin

Lynne Parker: The Abbey does so much. But Ireland needs a national theatre for the 21st century

The future of Irish theatre looks bleak. It’s time to overhaul the way the sector works – including where the money goes, says Rough Magic’s artistic director

Festivals in Ireland 2025: From Longitude to All Together Now – a guide to 80 of the best

From Brigit and Dublin Lunar New Year to Culture Night, Space Week and Cork Jazz Festival, here’s our round-up of cultural showcases to catch this year

Martin Beanz Warde: I regret being too busy to spend time with people who didn’t have a lot of time left

Martin Beanz Warde is a writer, actor, comedian and TV presenter. He is part of the cast of The Borrowers at Dublin’s Gate Theatre

Babygirl director Halina Reijn: ‘Our film is very sexy. It’s important to bring sex back after #MeToo’

Reijn’s wild ride of a movie stars Nicole Kidman, in a wickedly funny turn, as a chief executive embroiled in a sexual power struggle with an underling

Dublin Theatre Festival announces Róise Goan as new artistic director

Former head of Dublin Fringe Festival will take over from Willie White as artistic director and chief executive in February 2025

Changing career midlife: ‘At 45 I thought I was finished... But it didn’t even occur to me that I could do anything else’

More and more people are opting to switch professions in midlife. We talk to three people who have taken the plunge

Murmur: The young audience gasp and laugh, mesmerised by this playful, inventive performance

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Camiel Corneille weaves together sound and movement as he builds physical characters and imaginary worlds

Content: Hate speech, revenge porn and an exploding dog – A gripping portrayal of the human cost of sanitising social media

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Ross Dungan’s darkly comic play blends live illustration and multimedia with the theatrical to explore the disturbing world of content moderation

Global Desires: Flashes of brilliance, but this performance art leaves a sense of disruption and discomfort

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Outlandish Theatre’s nine performers explore what happens when desire rubs up against an unpleasant reality

The Jesus Trilogy: Beautifully textured adaptation captures all the sadness and mystery of JM Coetzee’s novels

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Annabelle Comyn’s evocative production, featuring Fergal McElherron and Elaine O’Dwyer, makes clever, convincing choices

Find Your Eyes: ‘Oh Lord, will it be like this all the way through?’ we ask at first. But this tricky piece rewards surrender

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: In this unclassifiable performance piece, Benji Reid creates a seductive amalgam of theatre, choreography and photography

Freefalling: A wild, extraordinary story that you couldn’t make up

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Georgina Miller’s account of her recent life mixes daredevil adrenaline with humour and a lightness of touch

Safe House: Enda Walsh’s new work is an oppressively desolate song cycle

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Kate Gilmore is impressive as a vulnerable young woman, but parts of the staging overwhelm her character

Exit, Pursued by a Bear: Pan Pan’s loose retelling of Shakespeare contains flashes of real artistry

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Manuel Zschunke is particularly compelling as the paranoid king Leontes in an uneven reimagining of The Winter’s Tale

Breaking: Two characters, four actors and a rotating series of scenes, emotions and meanings

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: In Amy Kidd’s play, actors of different genders, races, backgrounds and accents portray the same unhappy couple

Guest Host Stranger Ghost: A genuinely original high concept gets its first outing

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: This nomadic play’s use of other productions’ sets mirrors the insecure tenures so many young people are forced to put up with

Sandpaper on Sunburn: A humorous, compelling portrayal of what it means to be neurodivergent

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: David Horan’s family drama dives head first into the topic of autism

Home, Boys, Home: Dermot Bolger’s heartbreaking, witty script is also a powerful commentary on family, society and morality

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Ray Yeates, Fionnuala Gygax and Donna Anita Nikolaisen star in the final part of a trilogy that began with In High Germany

Trifled: Bawdy, fun, line-crossing modern romance in which everyone needs saving

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: Caitlin Magnall-Kearns’s play reminds us that we don’t know what’s going on behind closed doors

Darkmatter: A freaky, oozy horror dance

Dublin Theatre Festival 2024: The Dutch choreographer Cherish Menzo’s eventful piece has a frightening otherworldliness

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