Author: The Reviews Hub - Ireland

Concept and Direction by: Samara Hersch What was your favourite childhood story? If you could rule the world for 18 minutes what would you demand? What did you dream about last night?  PowerPlay is a mesmerizing, unique and precocious Polish piece of intermedial theatre, that elevates children’s theatre and pushes the limits of our wild imagination.  The ensemble consists of 8 members; four adults and four children, but in this context it feels wrong to define them as adults or children due to the youth the adults portrayed and maturity the children radiated. So from here on in they’ll be…

Devised by: Quintessence Theatre Company  Director: Calvin Magee (Original Director: Anna Simpson) Some of Our Children, devised by the presenting company of Quintessence Theatre, kicked off its National Tour this week at the New Theatre, Dublin. The research and development for this production involved interviews with members of the Irish Foster Care Association. The performance has an incredibly strong cast consisting of Anthony Kinahan as Boy, with Ceara Carney and Aisling Madden portraying an impressive variety of roles. Some of Our Children expresses a variety of snippets into the life of a young boy growing up through the foster care…

Writer: Eugene O’Neill Director: Garry Hynes A Moon for the Misbegotten is the lesser-known of Eugene O’Neill’s late-era plays based on his own life and family, with The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night produced far more regularly. All three excavated elements of the great writer’s life, about which he was not able to write until after his great popular and critical successes of the 1920s. As he retreated into semi-obscurity, depression, and ill health in the 1930s, he turned to face his past, and produced three mesmerising, heartbreaking, and drink-sodden plays, two of which secured his reputation,…

Book & Lyrics: Xnthony  Music & Lyrics: Matthew Floyd Jones  Directed By: Sarah Meadows Lourdes: The Musical! is a new musical with book and lyrics written by Xnthony, who has recently been making waves on the Irish musical theatre scene with his creation of irreverent and energetic new work.  After his successful production of Oliver Cromwell Is Really Very Sorry, Xnthony with Matthew Floyd James gives us Lourdes: The Musical! It follows actor Matthew (Riain Cash) who on the day he’s meant to get his big break and fly off to LA, gets told he’s HIV positive and so “not…

Writer: James Fritz Director: Lee Coffey We grow up surrounded by stories that promise us the same thing: meet the right person, fall in love and live happily ever after. But what happens when the fairy-tale ending isn’t the end of the story? James Fritz’s Ross & Rachel takes the familiar language of romantic comedy and turns it into something far more searching. Making its Irish premiere at The Civic Theatre, this one-person play follows a relationship across the years, exploring love, compromise, heartbreak and the expectations we attach to finding “The One”. The title immediately summons the cultural shorthand…

Directors: Chloe Claudel & Mitchell Polonsky  Creative Producer: Kerrigan Quenemoen New York’s theatre darling and sometimes London-based company, the curiously named ‘The Goat Exchange’ has opened Dublin’s Theatre Festival 2026 with an entertaining homage to Bette Davis and her Academy Award-winning film, All About Eve, at The Gaiety Theatre.  The production is inspired by a 1951 episode of America’s Lux Radio Theatre’s anthology series which featured some of the stars of the 20th Century Fox film reprising their famous roles. The story of All About Eve, which was written and  directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, was itself based on a…

Composer: Bizet Music Director/New Arrangements: Greg Arrowsmith Director: Cameron Menzies The latest updated staging of Carmen by Northern Ireland Opera at the Grand Opera House in Belfast, delivers a production that is unmistakably modern, yet pulses with the dangerous seductive energy that has made Bizet’s opera endure for 150 years. This production embraces the opera’s themes – freedom, desire, violence, and fate with a clarity that feels contemporary. The title role of Carmen played by Ruby Dibble is re-imagined not as a mythic femme fatale but as a fiercely free-spirited woman surrounded by male patriarchy that seeks to imprison her. The…

Writer: Maeve Press Maeve Press is an American actor, comedian, and writer, returning to this side of the Atlantic with her show Failure Confetti after taking it to the Edinburgh Festival two years ago. As a performer she’s endearing, witty, and extremely polished, and her show has genuine insight and heart. However, this work just doesn’t cohere into a whole that justifies itself sufficiently. The references are too Americanised to be fully relevant (this of course is unavoidable and natural, but it does beg the question about why the show was programmed), and, contradictory as this may sound, Press is…