Blue Raincoat to Present THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD

Blue Raincoat Theatre Company are set to enter new theatrical territory with their flagship production of 2014, John Millington Synge's iconoclastic The Playboy of the Western World.

Blue Raincoat's autumn production coincides with the publication of a book about the Sligo company: Frontiers of Representation: The Theatre of Blue Raincoat by Rhona Trench which is published by Carysfort Press.

Niall Henry last directed The Playboy of the Western World for the Abbey Theatre in 2002, in a production featuring Mikel Murfi and Olwen Fouere. He is excited about revisiting this work with Blue Raincoat Theatre Company: "Having thrown ourselves into the works of WB Yeats, Flann O'Brien and Beckett I'm thrilled to be exploring the work of Synge with Blue Raincoat for the first time and working on this dark, macabre play which our company will take in a new direction. This production marks out a very different theatrical style for Blue Raincoat and we are delighted and honoured that our President, Michael D Higgins will be marking the occasion by joining us for the opening night performance." First staged to riots when it opened in the Abbey in 1907, The Playboy of the Western World is a darkly comic masterpiece which tells the story of Christy Mahon, who stumbles into a public house in County Mayo claiming he has killed his father.

Currently Ireland's only professional theatre ensemble, Blue Raincoat have won the reputation as one of the country's most respected and creative theatre teams, synonymous with a range of theatre styles from classical Shakespeare to the absurd and expressionistic worlds of Ionesco and Flann O'Brien. Blue Raincoat's work this year has taken them to Scotland for the fifth year in a row, where the company have become an annual fixture at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre, with First Cosmonaut by Joyceln Clarke. Dublin audiences will have a chance to see this play about the life of Yuri Gagarin in 2015 when it visits Project Arts Centre (16 - 28 February). In July, the company staged WB Yeats' play, On Baile's Strand on a 5 mile stretch of beach in Sligo and remounted Malcolm Hamilton's 2004 play A Brief Taste of Lightning as part of Sligo's Tread Softly Festival.

Blue Raincoat Theatre Company are Ireland's only full-time venue-based professional theatre ensemble. The company and performance space, The Factory, were founded in 1991. Blue Raincoat produce between four and six professional productions each year, with an emphasis on staging modern European classics, new writing and new adaptations for stage. The company employs a repertory system to tour each of these productions throughout Ireland and internationally.

Blue Raincoat provides a broad range of professional arts related support for community and cultural programming within their immediate region, including the annual theatre academy at The Factory in Sligo, where for three weeks 40 professional actors attend workshops on voice training and corporal mime. The company received two Irish Times Theatre Award nominations for their adaptation of Flann O'Brien's The Poor Mouth in 2012.

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