Abbey Theatre Will Mark 120 Years of the National Theatre of Ireland With New Body of Work

The Abbey Theatre Co-Directors, Artistic Director Caitríona McLaughlin, and Executive Director Mark O'Brien have announced details of a new body of work to mark 120 years since the co-founding of Ireland's national theatre by Lady Gregory and WB Yeats. The work will celebrate Lady Gregory's trailblazing legacy as an artistic leader, a courageous producer and a champion of a generation of theatre makers.

In a spirit of collaboration as championed by Lady Gregory, several significant milestones in Irish theatre will be marked:

The 60th Birthday of playwright Marina Carr.

The 40th Anniversary of Rough Magic Theatre Company, led by Lynne Parker.

The 20th Anniversary of Landmark Productions, led by Anne Clarke.

And the 120th Anniversary of the Abbey Theatre.

 

Tickets for the first three plays go on sale today from the Abbey Theatre box office and website.

The Gregory Project

Under the banner of The Gregory Project, seven major plays will foreground Lady Gregory's ideals of excellence, ambition, inclusion, risk-taking and celebration, taking its lead from her tenacious, passionate, and relentless support of Irish artists, storytellers and writers. It will include works by Marina Carr, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Hilary Fannin, Elizabeth Kuti, Mary Manning and Barbara Bergin. Just as Gregory sought to help position the newly born Irish state as a dynamic, free-thinking, independent and European country, The Gregory Project will continue a similar interrogation of Irishness through theatre, examining who we are now – and asking who we might become in the future.

Commenting, Artistic Director and Co-Director at the Abbey Theatre, Caitríona McLaughlin said, “Lady Gregory's taste in art was honed across Europe, but her passion for language and story was ignited when listening to the people she lived among in the West of Ireland. She encouraged playwrights, both at the Abbey, and in her Coole Park home which she opened to them, to pursue excellence from their own perspective and in their own vernacular. Her legacy is every playwright who writes about their experience of Irish life, in their unique Irish voice.

“The six playwrights whose work makes up The Gregory Project are Hilary Fannin, Elizabeth Kuti, Barbara Bergin, Mary Manning, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Marina Carr.  Through their seven utterly original plays we hope to begin a new dialogue with our audience. I look forward to sitting in the theatre, sharing the experience with them and hearing what they have to say.”

Audrey or Sorrow

By Marina Carr

Directed by Caitríona McLaughlin

A Landmark Productions and Abbey Theatre co-production

Friday, 23rd February – Saturday, 23rd March 2024

The Gregory Project will open with Audrey or Sorrow, a new play by Marina Carr, with tickets on sale now. Marina Carr and Lady Gregory both represent writers fascinated by ancient myth, and what they can teach us about our humanity; each of them creators of epic plays grounded in red-blooded character, with myths and legends made local by setting them in recognisable rural Ireland. A dark and dangerously funny play, in which nothing is as it seems, Audrey or Sorrow will bring audiences on a shape-shifting, time-bending deep dive into a world of family secrets, unimaginable loss, ghosts behaving badly and the endless pull of the sea.

The play exemplifies Carr's legacy to date: a storytelling that tunnels deeply into the complicated contours of family dynamics; pushing the boundaries of love, power and desire. It will be the first of two world premieres of work by Carr, marking her 60th birthday and her third year as the Abbey Theatre's Senior Associate Playwright. Directed by Caitríona McLaughlin, this co-production between the Abbey Theatre and Landmark Productions is also part of Landmark Productions' 20th anniversary.

Na Peirsigh / Persians

Le hAeschylus

Aistrithe ag Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Á stiúradh ag Conor Hanratty

Léiriú Amharclann na Mainistreach

Wednesday, 6th March – Saturday, 6th April 2024

On the Peacock stage, the Abbey Theatre will produce a new Irish-language translation of Aeschylus' Greek tragedy Na Peirsigh / Persians by renowned writer and poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Reflecting on the foundations laid by Lady Gregory 120 years ago inspired the Abbey to look further back at the foundation of the art form itself in Ancient Greece. Na Peirsigh / Persians tells the story of a surprising Greek victory, extraordinarily told from the perspective of the losing side. A play that sets out so much of what theatre will do, has done and must do, it makes us imagine another perspective, subverting expectations and honouring the humanity of the enemy. It will be a thrilling opportunity to encounter a rich new version of Europe's oldest known surviving play and to find a way in to understanding its retelling in Europe's oldest spoken language, Irish, with English surtitles. 

Children of the Sun

By Hilary Fannin after Gorky

Directed by Lynne Parker

A Rough Magic and Abbey Theatre co-production

Saturday, 13th April – Saturday, 11th May

Later in 2024, Hilary Fannin's radical adaptation of Maxim Gorky's Children of the Sun will premiere on the Abbey Theatre stage. Augusta Gregory and Maxim Gorky wrote at a time of profound political change from different corners of Europe. Our mutual history is rooted in those events, and their aftermath, in the troubled century that brings us to the present. Fannin's version of Gorky's dark comedy will travel from the original text and setting to the here and now. At its core is the story of how a small family, their odd rattlebag of friends and one quixotic stranger distract, entertain and enrage each other at a point of crisis, while beyond their fragile walls their world is being reshaped by inexorable forces. We are all of us living - trying to live - in the face of overwhelming, cataclysmic change. Can collective thinking and / or belief systems: art, god, science, protect us, fuel us, contain us?  Do we find a reflection of ourselves in these people?  This production marks Rough Magic's 40th anniversary. 

With further dates details to be released in due course, The Gregory Project will see the premiere of four further Abbey Theatre productions:

The Boy

by Marina Carr

An Abbey Theatre Commission

The world premiere of a radical, contemporary Irish interpretation of the Greek Theban trilogy of Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, told from a mother's perspective. It continues Carr's conversation with the foundations of modern drama and questions what it means to be human in 2024.

 

The Sugar Wife

by Elizabeth Kuti

An Abbey Theatre Production

A story written at the knife edge of ethnicity and gender, highlighting the tension between appearances, perception and reality, and virtue signaling, against the backdrop of Ireland's challenging historic involvement in the sugar trade in the 1800s. This play of major ambition explores Irelands relationship to the wider world. Introducing international perspectives to Ireland was a priority of Lady Gregory's, putting Ireland in the context of a global conversation.

 

Youth's the Season - ?

by Mary Manning

A coming-of-age, tragi-comic satire, depicting occasionally vivacious, often morose, always droll Dublin youths as they wrestle with their ambitions, gender roles, uncertain futures, and themselves.

 

Dublin Gothic

by Barbara Bergin

Abbey Theatre Commission

A sprawling play which follows three generations through one Dublin house over a century of upheaval; offering a loser's history of Dublin, told in a mad pastiche of literary styles about people struggling to keep the only thing they have to lose: the roof over their heads. Lady Gregory championed new writing and understood the importance of staging the stories of our theatre's neighbourhood, the North Inner City. Barbara Bergin's extraordinary new play is epic in scale and depicts Dublin 1 through three generations of residents.

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