DUBLIN THEATRE FESTIVAL

A festival that began in a courtroom

Dublin Theatre Festival was established on 13 May 1957 by the impresario Brendan Smith, and it has run almost every autumn since — missing only two years — which makes it the oldest festival in Europe devoted specifically to theatre. The founding remit was double-edged from the start: import work that Irish audiences would not otherwise see, and push new Irish writing out into the world.

The first season collided immediately with the Ireland of the 1950s. Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo was staged at the tiny Pike Theatre, and the director was charged with presenting what the prosecution called a lewd entertainment; the case was eventually dismissed. The following year Archbishop John Charles McQuaid blocked Seán O'Casey's The Drums of Father Ned from the programme, and Samuel Beckett withdrew a mime piece in protest. The festival's early reputation was built less on comfort than on the things the state and the church would rather it had not shown.

The organisation is funded through the Arts Council, Dublin City Council and tourism bodies, and it works as a curator and co-producer rather than as a building: it books other people's stages across the city, from the Gaiety and the Abbey down to studio rooms and, in some years, sites with no seats at all.

Seven directors, and a handover in 2024

Smith ran the festival until 1983. After him came Lewis Clohessy (1984–89), Tony Ó Dálaigh (1990–99), Fergus Linehan (2000–04), Don Shipley (2005–06) and Loughlin Deegan (2007–11). Willie White took over as artistic director in 2012 and stayed for more than a decade, announcing that he would step down once the 2024 edition had closed.

His successor was named in October 2024: Róise Goan, reported at the time as the first woman to hold the post in the festival's then sixty-eight-year history. Goan is a Dublin native and a Trinity College drama graduate who ran Dublin Fringe Festival from 2008 to 2013, wrote for the TG4 series Aifric, and was working as an artistic coordinator at the Viernulvier arts institution in Ghent when the appointment came through. She said on being appointed that it was an honour to return to the city whose theatre had shaped her.

Her first programme, in 2025, ran for eighteen nights with 29 productions and work from Ireland plus ten other countries, including Peru, Ukraine, Poland, Belgium, India and Spain. The shift in emphasis was towards international companies physically bringing work to Dublin rather than Irish stages alone — a direction she has continued.

The 2026 programme: sorted by argument, not by genre

The 2026 line-up was announced on 15 July, with member priority booking opening straight away and general sales at noon on 29 July. It holds 26 productions across eighteen days, 24 September to 11 October, and it is grouped into four thematic strands rather than by form: Troublemakers, Irish Icons, The Matriarchy and It's Complicated. Goan has described her working question as what the most exciting theatre being made anywhere right now is, and how a Dublin audience might get to it inside eighteen days.

The international end is the most conspicuous change. The Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger made her Dublin debut with TANZ at the O'Reilly Theatre — an all-female cast spanning performers in their twenties to their eighties, framed as a dance class and built around stunts, live cameras, nudity and motorcycles, aimed squarely at ballet's demand for perfectible bodies. Brazil's Carolina Bianchi brought The Brotherhood, the French theatre-maker Rébecca Chaillon presented La Parabole du Seum, and Mario Banushi's wordless MAMI dealt with migrant identity. Australia's Polyglot Theatre supplied two outdoor children's shows, Bees and Pram People, programmed with The Ark.

The Irish side of the programme is equally busy: Druid's A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Gaiety from 1 October, Irish National Opera's Testament with music by Tarik O'Regan and a libretto by Colm Tóibín, ANU's Cyclone, Brokentalkers' Heroes of Tomorrow, Dead Centre's ZINC, Esosa Ighodaro's Let Me In, Xnthony's Lourdes, The Musical!, Amanda Coogan's Dignity — performed in Irish Sign Language and built around the deaf playwright Teresa Deevy — Animals at the Abbey with Pat Shortt, and Meredith at the Gate. Shortt noted that he had never previously appeared on the national theatre's stage.

The Negga problem

The programme launch had been led by one name above all others: Ruth Negga, starring in the world premiere of Radio Bette at the Gaiety, a collaboration with the New York company The Goat Exchange. On 21 August the company and the festival confirmed that Negga was stepping back from the run. No reason was given. The festival said the production would go ahead and that replacement casting would be announced within a week to ten days; Michael Cerveris and Roberta Colindrez were subsequently added.

The episode became its own talking point about the risk of hanging a festival's headline show on a screen star, and the finished production absorbed it with some cheek — reviewers noted a streak of self-reference running through the piece about the absent leading lady.

What the opening week actually looked like

Radio Bette opened the festival on 24 September and ran to the 27th at 90 minutes without an interval. It takes the 1950s Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of All About Eve and stages the recording session, complete with period soap commercials, then lets it drift: performers begin in leisurewear at a trestle table and end up in costume changes, disco, a Marilyn Monroe ventriloquist puppet and a play-within-a-play about Elizabeth I. Max McGuinness gave it four stars in the Irish Times, singling out Marcus Amaglo's Margo Channing and Chloe Claudel's Eve; Alan O'Riordan in the Irish Examiner was cooler at three, judging that it promised more unpredictability than it delivered.

The strongest notices of the first week went to ANU's Cyclone at Railway Court, a site-specific piece written and directed by Louise Lowe about Billy 'The Cyclone' Warren, a Black boxer and one-time sparring partner of Jack Johnson who spent decades outside the GPO in a bowler hat carrying a sandwich board for Nugget boot polish. The playing space is part derelict gym, part hospital day room, with choreographed boxing sequences; the cast includes Sheik Bah, Michael Glenn Murphy, Jamie O'Neill, Campbell Courage and LA Feeney. Chris O'Rourke gave it five stars in The Arts Review, O'Riordan four.

Elsewhere, Hysterically Shopping! To Some Sort of End — a pop opera from Glasshouse and Tasteinyourmouth at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, built on a love triangle between a checkout cashier and an AI till named Tilly — took four stars and a suggestion that it deserves a much longer life. Heroes of Tomorrow ran 25 September to 4 October in the Space Upstairs at Project Arts Centre: three performers, Malua Ní Chléirigh, Alice Roots and Michael Tient, address the audience directly as researchers, build artworks on stage and then take them apart, tracing a fictional Norwegian conceptual artist commissioned by a big-tech consortium. Reviewers read it as deliberately provocative and left arguing about it.

Cheap seats, wider map, seventieth year

Two structural commitments sit under the 2026 edition. The 10FOR10 scheme puts €10 tickets in front of under-thirties, unwaged people and freelance arts workers, with good seats held back for them rather than whatever is left. And every production in the programme carries at least one accessible performance — Irish Sign Language interpretation, captioning or a touch tour.

Geographically the festival has pushed past the usual city-centre ring to include the Civic Theatre in Tallaght. Goan has also linked the programming directly to who now lives in Dublin: a large international tech workforce that can sit outside local cultural life, which is part of why so much of the 2026 slate interrogates technology, corporate money, migration and power. In the same fortnight the festival hosted a meeting of the Prospero New European Wave network, bringing more than twenty European theatres and festivals into the city.

The 2026 edition is explicitly a run-up. The festival turns seventy in 2027, and the current season has been framed as the countdown to it.