Not on sale
We check the ticketer every hour
The profile · researched 24 September 2026
Radio Bette: a 1951 radio tape, eight actors and the hole where Ruth Negga was
The Goat Exchange, a New York company that builds shows out of recordings other people have thrown away, opened the 2026 Dublin Theatre Festival at the Gaiety with a world premiere made from a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of All About Eve — staged with two Broadway names drafted in after Ruth Negga's late withdrawal.
The booking that opened a festival
Radio Bette holds the Gaiety Theatre's main stage from 23 to 27 September 2026, the first production of the Dublin Theatre Festival's eighteen-day run. When the 2026 programme was announced on 15 July, the festival led with it: a world premiere at the Gaiety, presented in collaboration with the New York company The Goat Exchange, inside a line-up of 26 productions running from 24 September to 11 October. General booking opened on 29 July. The 23 September performance was billed as a preview, so the show's public opening coincided with the festival's own, on 24 September.
This is a co-production with the festival rather than a touring import dropped into a slot, with additional support credited to Susie Lopez through the Irish Theatre Trust. It is also a large room for an experimental company: the Gaiety's main house, with tickets from €15 to €50 on the festival's listing and from €17 on the theatre's own. The festival is counting down to its 70th anniversary in 2027, and artistic director Róise Goan has framed this edition as deliberately broad — her line to BroadwayWorld on 23 September was that no single show is for everyone, but that there is something in the programme for everybody.
Verbatim voicemails, a swimming pool and a kitchen sponge
The Goat Exchange is led by its two artistic directors, Chloe Claudel and Mitchell Polonsky, who founded it and who co-direct Radio Bette. The company's own description of what it makes is unusually precise for a mission statement: site-specific, multi-form theatrical experiences, and irreverent reappropriations of classic dramatic texts and verbatim transcripts. The reference points it claims are opera, dance, literature, film, contemporary music and architecture, and the venues it names run from bars to museums to public space. Its earliest listed work is a Streetcar Named Desire at Farkas Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2018. It now lists a company of eleven performers and nineteen associate artists, some of whom also work with the Wooster Group.
The method shows up plainly in two recent New York pieces. Deadclass, Ohio, made with the playwright Eliya Smith and staged at The Tank, was assembled from verbatim voicemails, family photographs and Tadeusz Kantor's The Dead Class, with a live score. Reviewing it for Theater Scene on 14 March 2025, Darryl Reilly called the result beguiling, striking and antic, singled out choreography that deepened the piece's dreamlike quality, and described costume work that mixed vintage, contemporary and fantastical registers against lighting of muted hues. It ran 70 minutes without an interval. Two Girls, a one-night two-hander at Ars Nova written by Smith and performed by Claudel with Juliana Sass, was built from verbatim interviews about the cultural afterlife of a notorious shock-porn video.
That reputation travelled ahead of the Dublin booking. RTÉ's festival preview, published on 22 September, described The Goat Exchange as the hottest theatre company in New York and credited it with two New York Times Critics' Picks inside nine months, alongside a promise of backstage drama, extreme glamour and Hollywood nostalgia with a contemporary New York edge.
What the tape is, and who plays whom
The source material is a rare 1951 radio recording of All About Eve, made for the Lux Radio Theater — the long-running series that turned Hollywood pictures into hour-long broadcasts with the screen cast at the microphone. Radio Bette is not a stage adaptation of the film. It works from the recording itself, and from the gap between the people on it and the personas they were selling: the festival's framing is the layers of performance that shape public and private selves, and the question of who owns a voice.
The role assignments make that gap the structure of the evening rather than a theme announced from the stage. Marcus Amaglo takes Bette Davis. Chloe Claudel plays Anne Baxter, Michael Cerveris plays George Sanders, Roberta Colindrez plays Celeste Holm, and Vann Dukes doubles Thelma Ritter and Marilyn Monroe. Paul Lazar plays both William Keighley — the Lux broadcast's own director, a man whose job was to run the room — and Gregory Ratoff. Adam Silver plays Gary Merrill and Kayta Thomas plays Hugh Marlowe. Casting cuts across gender and type throughout, so the audience is always watching two performances stacked on one another: the 1951 radio actor, and the 2026 actor listening to them.
The production is designed as a full staging rather than a reading. Forest Entsminger designs the set, Celeste Jennings the costumes and Finn Bamber the lighting; Polonsky handles music and sound, Elizabeth Dement the choreography, and Kerrigan Quenemoen is creative producer. The festival's copy promises something playful, irreverent and camp, and the technical warnings — flashing lights, strobe, smoke and haze — suggest the radio studio is a starting point rather than a set to be reproduced.
The Negga gap
The show Dublin bought in July is not quite the show that opened in September. When the programme was announced on 15 July, Radio Bette was billed as starring Ruth Negga, the Academy Award nominee, and her name carried the festival's launch coverage. She withdrew a few weeks before opening.
Goan addressed it on the festival's opening day, 24 September, saying the festival was really sad to hear that Negga had to leave the show, and that the show must go on — with Michael Cerveris and Roberta Colindrez among the replacements. Both are substantial stage names rather than like-for-like substitutions. Cerveris has won two Tony Awards, for Assassins in 2004 and Fun Home in 2015; Colindrez originated the role of Joan in Fun Home and has worked steadily in television since, in I Love Dick, Vida and A League of Their Own. The recasting shifts the centre of gravity of the piece from a single marquee lead to an ensemble of eight, which is closer to how The Goat Exchange has always worked anyway.
Where it stands, late September 2026
As of the festival's opening day, the run is effectively half gone: evening performances on 24 and 25 September at 7.30pm, a matinee and an evening on 26 September at 2.30pm and 7.30pm, and a closing matinee on 27 September at 2.30pm. The 27 September matinee is open-captioned. A post-show Talking Theatre discussion is scheduled for 26 September, which for a company this process-driven is likely to be the most informative hour of the week.
No press reviews had been published at the time of writing — the preview was only the night before the festival opened, and the Dublin critics were covering an opening weekend with 26 shows in it. What exists so far is the festival's own billing, the company's track record downtown, and a five-day window at the Gaiety before the theatre hands over to Druid's A Moon for the Misbegotten from 1 October. There is no announced onward tour.
The show, now
One act, no interval: the festival lists 90 minutes and the Gaiety's own page roughly 100, so expect somewhere between the two. There is no support act and no curtain-raiser — this is a festival theatre booking on the Gaiety's main stage, with tickets from €15 to €50. Eight performers work from a 1951 Lux Radio Theater recording of All About Eve, taking the parts of the screen actors who made it rather than the characters they played: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter doubled with Marilyn Monroe, plus the broadcast's own director at the microphone. Casting runs across gender and type throughout. It is staged rather than read — set by Forest Entsminger, costumes by Celeste Jennings, lighting by Finn Bamber, choreography by Elizabeth Dement, music and sound by Mitchell Polonsky — and the technical warnings for flashing lights, strobe, smoke and haze indicate a good deal more than a studio table. The company's billing is playful, irreverent and camp. On the evidence of their previous work, the texture to expect is closer to what one New York critic described of Deadclass, Ohio in March 2025: antic and surreal, with choreography doing much of the emotional work and lighting kept in muted hues. Under-16s must be accompanied by an adult, and under-3s are not admitted. The 27 September matinee is open-captioned; a post-show talk with the makers follows the 26 September matinee. No reviews had appeared by the festival's opening day, 24 September 2026.
Researched from dublintheatrefestival.ie · gaietytheatre.ie · rte.ie · rte.ie · rte.ie · broadwayworld.com · thegoatexchange.com · thegoatexchange.com