The year in theatre: At last, Ireland has lost its fear of new writing for the stage
Is the worst behind us? It’s a question that might have occurred to anyone watching the Abbey Theatre’s unsettling Youth’s the Season–?, one of the first big productions of 2025, and a bleak depiction of Dublin 100 years ago.Set at a weary jazz-age party, Mary Manning’s long-neglected comedy presented a gang of scenesters already ceding defeat to the capital: a young designer desperate to move to London; a struggling novelist in a competitive industry (“Who isn’t in Dublin?”).The play – possibly a veiled portrait of the founders of the Gate Theatre, who were then in their late 20s – seeks sympathy for young people’s hardship; the struggle was real.The Dublin of 2025 has also sat somewhere uncertain, a city still in the thrall of rapid development, several of its venues razed in recent memory. A city-council policy mandating developers to include community and cultural spaces in big apartment complexes was already showing signs of being undermined by unwise construction trends when new guidelines from the Department of Housing seemed to scrap the obligation altogether.READ MOREThe Big Irish Times Quiz of the Year 2025Twenty years ago, The Irish Times tried to predict 2025. It got quite a few things right‘Is it worth taking my family to see a grandad who is only sort of interested in seeing them?’[ ‘The Constitution will soon put women back in their place. Everything is fizzling away’: Sarah Jane Scaife on Youth’s the Season–?Opens in new window ]Encouragingly, even as the prospect of more cultural spaces dwindled, the theatre establishment made clear its appetite for new material, starting with the Abbey, which announced a year-long programme featuring six new plays.Those of us who went to the theatre in the 2010s remember a fear of new writing, as well as a presumption that it would fare poorly at the box office. That left us on a diet of revivals of classics.In 2025, the recipe had changed. It may have borrowed generously from Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, but The Ferryman, Jez Butterworth’s staggering Broadway and West End blockbuster set during The Troubles, which was staged at the Gaiety Theatre in January, was still a deviation from the venue’s run of familiar plays by John B Keane and Martin McDonagh.More unfamiliar was the Gate Theatre’s absorbing production of Abi Morgan’s Lovesong, an adventurous work from the UK’s pioneering physical-theatre scene, tracing a roll-with-the-punches marriage spanning 40 years until its very end.[ Lovesong writer Abi Morgan: ‘I feel incredibly grateful to be here. It’s nearly seven years since Jacob collapsed’Opens in new window ]Some plays from abroad arrived with remarkable timing. The doomer era, with its artistic visions of fascist takeover and climate catastrophe, was quietly announced a decade ago by Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, an oblique drama in which the garden chitchat of four retired women is interrupted by multiple forecasts of how the world will end. The play received a darkly accomplished production by Hatch Theatre Company and the Everyman, in Cork, in which its more conspiratorial reports, such as a public-health crisis caused by tampered sugar, or a chemical attack originating in toxins hidden in circulated cash, sounded even more as if they belonged to a post-pandemic world teeming with manufactured distrust.The Abbey’s year-long programme of new plays involved commendable risk-taking, including with The Boy and The God and His Daughter, Marina Carr’s latest adaptation bringing modern psychology to ancient tragedy – this time around Sophocles’ Theban plays – which was also a late-career swerve into marathon 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’Opens in new window ]Playwrights in the second decade of their careers were also reinventing their approaches: Caitríona Daly, author of meticulously gruelling dramas, dived into head-spinning comedy reminiscent of the Italian surrealist Luigi Pirandello with The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4; Carys D Coburn reined in the swirling form of their previous plays for Bán, a precise transposition of a Spanish classic to secretive 1980s Ireland.[ Patrick O’Kane on Denouement: ‘It’s a play about renewal in the face of an apocalypse’Opens in new window ]At Dublin Theatre Festival, Shane O’Reilly’s Her Father’s Voice, a drama about a deaf child awaiting cochlear-implant surgery, made a departure by containing a lengthy opera film sequence – but it was another work that rattled easily when shaken, its live performances subordinated to video design. “Scarring” is a term used in economics to describe lasting damage caused by recession. More positively, we may be seeing the jobbing playwrights who emerged in the early 2010s, long without resourced institutions on board, now playing catch-up.[ Shane O’Reilly: ‘This was not the way my parents grew up. People were not proud of their deaf children’Opens in new window ]Those offerings contrasted with work by companies long in the business of devising new plays. Brokentalkers’ The Mirror Stage was an illuminating dance play separating real-life psychotic hallucinations from reality. Dublin Fringe Festival was once again a haven for playwrights of the global majority. (Despite the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s death, the establishment’s programming still made it feel as if the questioning summer of 2020 never happened.)Dafe Pessu Orugbo’s Am I the A**hole? was an admirable courtroom spoof teasing unconscious biases. Mai Ishikawa’s physical-theatre play Constriction was a stately walk-through of motherhood’s secrets. Arinola Theatre’s high-concept The Deadline Project depicted relationship drama between bandmates as one of life’s constants, its two musical exes seen disagreeing ... until the end of the world.[ Rébecca Chaillon: ‘Black women in theatre, I don’t see them. Maybe they are cleaning the toilets’Opens in new window ]Adaptations of existing work shouldn’t be shunned. With A Misanthrope, Sugarglass and Smock Alley Theatre turned Molière’s 17th-century comedy into a knockout satire of Dublin’s tech world.With Deaf Republic, an account of besieged Ukraine seen from the point of view of a deaf person, Dead Centre created a startlingly intimate work that doubled as commentary on theatre’s audism.Poor, Katriona O’Sullivan’s bestselling memoir from 2023, was adapted by Sonya Kelly to give the Gate Theatre the biggest box-office opening in its history. [ ‘Watch your step’: Steve Coogan takes Patrick Freyne backstage at Dr StrangeloveOpens in new window ]We will stray into a discussion of classics only for Druid’s astonishing double bill of Riders to the Sea and Macbeth – the best production of the year.To mark their company’s half-century, the director Garry Hynes and the actor Marie Mullen wove Synge and Shakespeare’s perversions of nature and justice into a magnificent medieval horror. (Imagine being in the game this long and being this good.)[ A Druid show and a sandwich for 50p: How Mick Lally, Marie Mullen and Garry Hynes began their theatre company 50 years agoOpens in new window ]Sometimes a new name sticks. This year saw a first significant wave of revivals of plays by Nancy Harris – The Beacon in Cork, Our New Girl in Belfast, and No Romance in Dublin – suggesting that the genre-hopper’s work has staying power, and is taking root in the landscape of Irish theatre.That makes playwrighting seem as if it really can be a career. A century ago, when she was writing Youth’s the Season–?, Mary Manning included a character she had clearly modelled on herself: a quippy flapper who’s horrified by the play’s shocking conclusion. “Let me out,” she exclaimed. “I want to get out!” (Manning herself exited Dublin shortly after the play premiered, emigrating to the United States, where she stayed for three decades.)As 2025 ends, we’re optimistic about a place that’s far more hospitable and full of possibility than it used to be, where new writing could be the norm, not the exception. This, here, is playwright’s country.
