Between 1606 and 1607, William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth. Two hundred and twenty years later, in 1827, Joseph Niépce took a photograph. It would be another 130 years before the Dublin Theatre Festival was established in 1957, but the ricochet effect of those elements was still felt in this year's 68th edition of the Theatre Festival.
In the programme notes for the expansive 2025 festival, the first under the Artistic Direction of Róise Goan - one which encompassed theatre, opera, dance, circus and performance art alongside critics panels, symposia, book launches and a walking tour - audiences were urged to question "Is this theatre"? A question Niépce’s photo had indirectly prompted long before.
By now it is well documented that the birth of photography led to a crisis of representation amongst visual artists of the era, threatening their commitment to the reproduction of reality in painting. Why continue over extended periods trying to reproduce in paint what a photograph could now achieve more faithfully in a matter of seconds? What might have spelt the demise of the art form instead became the birth of modern art, as artists, now freed from the constraints of mere mimesis, dared to question "What is art?".
(Pic: Rich Davenport)
Though the photograph, not to mention a rapidly changing world, had prompted the question, it was artists willingness to self-interrogate and to examine the limitations of their artform within the artform itself that ultimately led to its evolution.
For painting, this meant exposing rather than denying the folly of representing a 3D world on a flat 2D canvas, an exposition which lead to beloved art movements like Cubism. For theatre, this meant disrupting the hermetically sealed world of the stage which denies its audience and instead declaring rather than concealing the workings of theatre. In the end, the perceived threat of film ironically strengthened such older artforms as theatre by forcing it to identify its area of competence - to address what made theatre unique as an artform.
And so, at the dawn of the age of AI, the question "Is this theatre?" seems more important than ever. Through such self-reflective questions, theatre once again needs to define its singularities, to drill down on what is unique and central to it in 2025 as artists did at the turn of the 20th century.
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Listen: RTÉ Arena on the 2026 Dublin Theatre Festival
As the Dublin Theatre Festival this year included a vast range of productions from across the globe, including India, Ukraine and Peru, it might seem reductive to solely concentrate on Irish productions of classical and canonical plays. These contemporary takes on canonical works are themselves an example of self-criticism, however, as contemporary artists are in conversation with their own tradition. They offer both an opportunity to question how these older plays speak to contemporary audiences, and what the role of theatre is today in a cultural context often dominated by film.
Druid’s production of Macbeth, for example, provides a solid foundation for the 400-year-old play to speak across time. In Garry Hynes’ production, famed lines such as "things bad begun make themselves strong by ill" and "confusion now hath made his masterpiece" are delivered with freshness and fluency, finding new resonance amongst audiences grappling with the atrocities of globalised war.
Marty Rea adds both a nuanced vulnerability to the well-trodden figure of Macbeth and at times an animalistic physical performance which illuminate the power dynamics at play in his marriage to Marie Mullen’s Lady Macbeth. If Rea’s Macbeth is fluid and shifting, Mullen’s Lady Macbeth is sculptural and formidable. Their corrosive dynamic is provocatively reinterrogated by the age difference created by Amy Rowan’s casting of the Macbeths, calling to mind contemporary cultural figures such as the Macrons.
as the Three Witches in Macbeth (Pic: Ros Kavanagh)
There are new lessons to be gained by witnessing the costs of Macbeth’s conscience in 2025, which seems almost a lost relic in a contemporary political climate often operating without one. Francis O’ Connor’s set and Colin Grenfell’s lighting appear to draw inspiration from Caravaggio and religious references abound in a stable-like space over which a crucifix looms large. There is little change to the barn-like set throughout the performance which speaks to Macbeth’s downfall, like the witches prophesy, as being a fete accompli, but also to the entrapment of indoctrination.
Theatre's ability to offer moments of live encounter and collective witnessing to an increasingly physically disconnected world, should make it an artform more relevant than ever.
Hynes’ production plays with the conventions of theatre and a portion of the audience seated onstage flank opposing sides of the playing space. This does good work in breaking down the segregation between audience and action in the proscenium arched auditorium of the Gaiety Theatre (and nods to the rounded structure of Shakespeare’s own Globe Theatre) but there could be more put at stake in this dynamic to celebrate the liveness of theatre. In the final scene where Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane, the production overly strays into the cinematic with the jarring use of green strip lighting. This is a moment where the limitations of the theatre need to be confronted rather than disguised, and this scene speaks to the pitfalls of defining theatre by cinematic standards. Ultimately, it is Druid’s ensemble that remind us of theatre’s singularities and the importance of funding ensemble theatre. In this versatile well-knit cast where actors take on multiple roles, and in moments where Hynes makes the transitions between roles obvious, the immediacy and sense of play unique to theatre are made clear and celebrated.
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Listen: Playwright Marina Carr talks The Boy with Oliver Callan
In contrast to Druid’s faithful rendering of Shakespeare’s text, in The Boy at the Abbey Theatre Marina Carr marries the ancient with the contemporary in a play that takes its bearings from Sophocles’ Theban plays. In Carr’s version, gods and monsters walk among humans and prophesies are legal documents. The opening lines seems to muse on what is central to theatre, "There’s only us and the stories we can spin." Yet there are again religious undertones here in the set design by Cordelia Chisholm where an elongated dinner table, reminiscent of the Last Supper, takes centre stage, pointing to the lasting influence of the Catholic church in a contemporary Ireland mostly divested of its governance. This is where Carr’s reworking derives its power and the ancient Greek myth of mother-loving and father-slaying Oedipus converses with Ireland’s troubled histories. In a particularly affecting scene, Oedipus’ mother Jocasta (Eileen Walsh) in search of her baby son Oedipus visits Cithaeron, a site where banished newborn babies hang from trees. The harrowing scene fuses ancient brutalities with more recent atrocities such as the Tuam baby scandal, and ancient Greece and contemporary Ireland collide in the Abbey auditorium when Jocasta admits that "Even still I wake astonished it wasn’t just some dream. That it happened. That this city allowed it to happen... We can never allow this to happen again."
The violence of the scene at Cithaeron also reminds us of theatre’s unique ability to create live moments of collective witnessing. The Boy too offers a welcome opportunity to see a canonical play central to theatre’s origins, but there are costs to mounting such an epic, which can be seen at times in weaker crowd scenes where the chorus central to classical theatre are constrained by contemporary budgets. There are moments where the production celebrates the theatrical - such as in an arresting physical performance by Jolly Abraham, playing the Godwoman - but the dramatic excesses of Greek tragedy are often tempered in this production. This is where greater investment in mounting such productions is needed as well as a new commitment to repertory theatre, where actors are primed and supported as theatre artists within that tradition rather than simply using theatre as a primer for better-paid film work. Abraham’s performance is a necessary reminder of the need to retain the physical language of theatre, a full bodied language distinct from the still subtleties of film acting.
The Boy does not challenge its source material as much as it extends it. Carr updates Sophocles' warning in Oedipus Rex of the dangers of ignoring the prophetic to the more complex contemporary wrestle with fake news, and Oedipus’s loss of sight in The Boy speaks to the blinkered nature of an increasingly polarised contemporary world. The ridicule of the prophetic figure of the Shee, played with command by the inimitable Olwen Fouéré, bears parallels to contemporary scepticism of the expert and climate change, and its depiction of an ancient society that distrusts women echoes the horrors of Ireland’s historic silencing of women.
(Pic: Ros Kavanagh)
This is a concern Carys D. Coburn adopts in Bán at the Peacock theatre, a reworking of Lorca’s tragic masterpiece, The House of Bernarda Alba. In Bàn, Coburn transposes the context of Lorca’s last play from Franco’s Spain to 1980’s Ireland but retains the central narrative of a family of five sisters over whom their domineering mother Bernarda, or in this case, Bernadette (Bríd Ní Neachtain) wields excessive control. Here, Coburn pulls tighter on themes of intergenerational trauma, which offer insights into the historic mistreatment of unmarried mothers in this country. The play interrogates the toxic legacy of shame and racism and the paradox of matriarchy being both noxious upholders and casualties of white patriarchal ideals. Bán speaks back to the prophetic fables of Oedipus and Macbeth as Bernie concedes to her illegitimate half-sister Frances (Yvonne Gidden): 'We were born sorry, the two of us, you the bastard and me the bastard’s sister, the whole sordid story written on our faces for anyone to read whenever we stood side by side, born paying for crimes we didn’t commit, born sorry that he did what he did, and all I’ve ever done is try not to get any sorrier’.
a confluence between body and word.' (Pic: Rich Davenport)
The dramatic incline of Sarah Bacon’s raked stage helps convey that uphill struggle while the Formica-style kitchen set with red flooring foreshadows the play's violence and compounds the sense of claustrophobia within the sisters’ stifled expression. Not so much an elephant but a large oversized washing machine dominates the playing space around which, like the truth, the sisters circumnavigate to make copious amounts of white bread sandwiches, itself a trademark of Irish life. Coburn’s writing is full-bodied but pacey and draws attention both to the tradition of Irish drama - such as in the moment where Edele (Liadán Dunlea) dances vigorously to the radio, recalling Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa - but at the same time it confronts the conceit of theatre as in Annie’s acknowledgement of the interval: "Welcome back. It’s been 15 minutes for you, a little longer for us."
Though Bán becomes slightly weighed down in tying up too many separate accounts of trauma, its strength lies in Coburn’s understanding of theatre as a site of encounter, a confluence between body and word. In a particularly arresting fight scene, skilfully arranged by fight director Ciarán O’Grady, a tussle between sisters culminates in Edele (Dunlea) spitting in Annie’s (Malua Ní Chléirigh) face. The visceral moment cuts through the mimetic artifice of theatre, and for a moment actor and audience occupy the same space. Rather than employing film projections, headsets or imposing music scores to help theatre remain relevant in a screen-driven 21st century like other contemporary revisions of canonical works in the festival, the power of this moment is derived from a celebration of what is key to this artform – its liveness.
Theatre's ability to offer moments of live encounter and collective witnessing to an increasingly physically disconnected world, should make it an artform more relevant than ever. We therefore need more moments that reaffirm theatre’s liveness, more moments that reinforce the need to be in a room together witnessing collectively. So theatre artists and audiences in securing the future of theatre must drill down on what is central to theatre by not only asking "Is this theatre?" but, "Is this trying to be film?"
About The Author: Louisa Carroll is a writer and Irish Research Council Doctoral Scholar. She is also a tutor in the department of English, Drama and Film at UCD and a literary reviewer.
