Dublin Theatre Festival 2026

From 24 September to 11 October, Dublin Theatre Festival will draw back the curtain on extraordinary stories from Ireland and across the world. Over 18 days and nights, audiences are invited to discover work that challenges assumptions, provokes conversation and celebrates the power of theatre to connect, inspire and expand understanding of the world. The full programme is available at dublintheatrefestival.ie.

Amanda Coogan with Lianne Quigley, Alvean Jones and Dublin Theatre of the Deaf

24 – 27 September | Cube

Previews: €20 | Performances: €25/23

Performed in Irish Sign Language

This acclaimed collaboration returns to its enduring engagement with the work of deaf playwright Teresa Deevy, reimagining one of her most celebrated radio plays in the centenary year of Radio Éireann. “Leave your mind free to follow my words.” In Deevy’s 1939 radio play, listeners are invited into an unseen world.

In Dignity, audiences are invited into another invisible realm, following bodies, movement and sign as they reveal what happens beyond the reach of sound. Like Deevy, we have learned to listen differently. Through Irish Sign Language, we watch, sign and resist, opening a visual world that deepens our connection to her work and its transformation into a rich choreographic language.

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Brokentalkers

25 Sept – 4 October | Space Upstairs

Previews: €23 | 28 & 30 Sept: €28/25 | 1 – 4 Oct: €33/30

ISL Interpreted performance: 1 Oct

Audio Described performance and Touch Tour: 2 Oct

“It’s a strange world now” – David Hasselhoff

This year. A major gallery in a capital city. A celebrated Scandinavian artist is about to present his latest work. It could be his last. Heroes of Tomorrow is a story of how we got here. It’s a story of art, power and protest. A story of possibility, connection and corruption. An epic tale of oil, trade, weaponry, technology, colony and creativity. Of Vikings, empire, exploitation and extraction. Heroes of Tomorrow is the latest work from award winning Brokentalkers, created in collaboration with acclaimed theatre maker Andy Smith.

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Company Philip Connaughton and Once Off Productions

30 Sept – 4 Oct | Cube

Preview: €25 | Performances: €30/27

Audio Described performance: 4 Oct, 1:15pm

Choreographer Philip Connaughton brings together seven internationally acclaimed dancers aged 46 to 86 and renowned composer-musician Mel Mercier for a striking new live performance charged with presence, urgency and defiance. Combining dance, live music and personal testimony, Rebellious Hope offers a rare encounter with performers whose vulnerability and virtuosity are shaped by decades of lived experience. Rebellious Hope explores endurance, desire, memory and asks what remains, what endures and what compels us to carry on.

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Once Off Productions

6 – 11 October | Cube

Preview: €25 | Performances: €30/27

ISL Interpreted performance: Sun 11 Oct, 5pm

Radical, intimate and darkly funny, 4.48 Psychosis remains “a work of extraordinary beauty” (The New York Times) – confronting despair, lucidity, survival and death with devastating clarity.

Director Tom Creed and performer Marty Rea bring extraordinary precision and emotional intensity to one of the most influential plays of the last thirty years, in a rare opportunity for Irish audiences to encounter the work of one of the most challenging and controversial playwrights of the 20th century.

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Compagnie Dans le Ventre

8 – 10 October | Space Upstairs

Tickets: €35/32 | Performed in French with English subtitles

The starting point of La Parabole du Seum [Parable of the Sour] is Fear and the necessity it creates to organise in order to survive it. Rébecca Chaillon brings together performers who live on the margins and who actively engage daily with the future and its (im)possibilities.

She moves Heaven and Earth, including her home territory of Seine-Saint-Denis, to broaden the horizon of what is possible, composing a work at once astronomical and astrological which brings together text, performance, visual and sound imagery: a parable of venom and anger which seeks to spark dreams, laughter, empathy, and revolt against the coming fascism.

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