With many announcements still to be made, and several independent companies taking existing productions on the road, it remains to be seen how 2024′s commendably adventurous programming will play out. Will this streak continue? Will some box-office pain influence a return to more familiar material? We choose to be hopeful. The Abbey Theatre’s revival of the long-neglected 1931 play Youth’s the Season -? is expected to deliver a rare vision of 1920s Dublin as young, arty, partying and campy. The Gate’s production of Lovesong, by Abi Morgan, will present a 40-year marriage onstage. Moulin Rouge! The Musical is intensely romantic. How they warm these cold hearts of ours.
Fledermaus
Siamsa Tíre, Tralee, February 1st, then touring until February 23rd, visiting Cork, Kilkenny, Limerick, Galway, Sligo, Letterkenny, Navan, Dundalk and Dún Laoghaire, irishnationalopera.ie
It’s disguised identities at a masquerade ball in 19th-century Vienna as Irish National Opera stages Johann Strauss’s upbeat classic. Next-generation stars Jade Phoenix (La Ciociara) and Sarah Shine (The First Child) play a prisoner’s wife and her maid, their separate schemes leading them towards the biggest party in town. Large-scale debut for director Davey Kelleher.
Dr Strangelove
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, February 5th-22nd, bordgaisenergytheatre.ie
Stanley Kubrick’s dark cold-war comedy, about a paranoid US general leading the world towards mutually assured destruction, saw the corridors of power as populated by contrivedly macho, chisel-jawed men smoking cigars, chewing gum and sleeping with their secretaries. That doesn’t sound unlike the toxic worlds portrayed by Armando Iannucci in Veep, The Death of Stalin and more, who is one of the writers of this stage adaptation, swiftly transferring from the West End of London. Steve Coogan takes on the multiple roles made famous in the film by Peter Sellers.
Men’s Business
Glass Mask Theatre @ Bestseller, Dublin, February 11th-March 1st, glassmasktheatre.com
Something of a coup for Glass Mask Theatre, which secures Simon Stephens’s new adaptation of this play by Franz Xaver Kroetz, the social realist of 1970s German theatre. A man and a woman (and a dog) all clash within the dangerously sharp confines of a butcher’s shop. Premiering in Dublin before playing in London.
King Lear
Gate Theatre, Dublin, February 21st-April 27th, gatetheatre.ie
A huge television audience may know him from Game of Thrones, but Conleth Hill – catapulted into the mainstream by Marie Jones’s comic 1996 play Stones in his Pockets – is a theatre creature through and through. While appearing in HBO’s fantasy drama he also performed in plays by Chekhov, Edward Albee and Annie Baker. All roads lead, fittingly, to Lear, Shakespeare’s swaggering king, who elicits performances from his daughters that lead to a catastrophic transition of power.
& Juliet
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, February 25th-March 8th, bordgaisenergytheatre.ie
For some, this enthusiastic rewriting of Romeo and Juliet might fist-bump emptily with girlboss feminism. It remains one of the smartest ideas in jukebox-musical history. The playwright David West Read secured the rights to the back catalogue of the Swedish hit-maker Max Martin, so allowing Juliet to wake miraculously from her deathbed to Britney Spears’s …Baby One More Time, escape to Paris accompanied by Robyn’s Show Me Love and reunite angrily with Romeo to Kelly Clarkson’s Since You’ve Been Gone. Flashes of brilliance.
The Velveteen Rabbit
Lyric Theatre, Belfast, March 14th-30th, lyrictheatre.co.uk
Before there was Toy Story there was Margery Williams’s children’s book about a stuffed rabbit, attached to the idea of coming to life, and pushed aside by a new wave of mechanical toys. The industrious Replay Theatre teams up with Belfast’s Lyric Theatre to present this new musical adaptation, with music by Duke Special and a book by the novelist Jan Carson.
Little One
Glass Mask Theatre @ Bestseller, Dublin, March 18th-April 5th, glassmasktheatre.com
A surprise production of the Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch’s chilling play in which two adults revisit their childhoods adopted into the same family. Glass Mask Theatre again subverts reassuring ideas of dinner theatre, insisting on serving a psychological drama to go with your Bordeaux.
The Flying Dutchman
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, March 23rd-29th, irishnationalopera.ie
The expanse of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre transforms into the spooky Norwegian harbour town of Wagner’s opera, as a sailor’s daughter is haunted by the captain of a sunken ship. Irish National Opera brings back the horror-opera star Giselle Allen.
The Lottery
Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Co Kildare, March, riverbank.ie
After his fetching play A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Dan Colley’s next instalment of South American magical realism is inspired by a short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Expect strange goings-on in an offbeat town whose inhabitants’ lives are ruled by an omnipresent lottery company.
Youth’s The Season -?
Abbey Theatre, Dublin, April 2nd-May 3rd, abbeytheatre.ie
“Dammit, it was the 20s and we had to be smarty!” Dorothy Parker said. Dublin’s own version of a 1920s metropolis populated by arty, campy scenesters trying very hard to be funny comes to life in Mary Manning’s long-neglected play. Some might read this story of startlingly literate young things partying and languishing in the new Free State as a veiled portrait of a Bohemian set that included Micheál MacLiammóir, Hilton Edwards and Samuel Beckett. Manning, a film critic turned playwright, could also camp it up. When MacLiammóir requested on his deathbed that she remove the question mark from the play’s title, she said “No, Micheál. No.”
Our New Girl
Lyric Theatre, Belfast, April 8th-May 4th, lyrictheatre.co.uk
A large-scale debut for director Rhiann Jeffrey, whose productions Distortion and This Sh*t Happens All the Time were slippery accounts of navigating homophobic worlds in Northern Ireland. That makes her a good candidate for Nancy Harris’s excellent play, a sexism satire meets psychological thriller in which an insecure mother is surprised to discover that her husband has hired an enigmatic nanny without consulting her.
Chora
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, May 13th, then touring until May 28th, visiting Wexford, Belfast and Cork, luail.ie
How is Ireland’s new all-island dance company, led by Liz Roche, shaping up? It makes its debut by opening Dublin Dance Festival with this triple bill choreographed by Maria Campos and Guy Nader, Roche, and Mufutau Yusuf. Performed with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, they’re billed as drawing on themes of home, memory and landscape.
Lovesong
Gate Theatre, Dublin, May 14th-June 15th, gatetheatre.ie
How do you present a 40-year marriage on stage? Abi Morgan’s tear-jerker about an older couple at a crossroads is fittingly directed by David Bolger, the CoisCéim choreographer, as the couple’s younger selves are seen drifting into their house and revisiting their regrets and their accomplishments. Lovesong always moved like a dance.
L’Elisir d’Amore
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, May 25th-31st, then touring until June 7th, visiting Wexford and Cork, irishnationalopera.ie
It’s hard to imagine this 19th-century romcom of an opera standing still for long, as slapstick king Cal McCrystal directs Gaetano Donizetti’s story about a labourer on a country estate who, with the help of a love potion, becomes the most admired man in town.
Wreckquiem
Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick, June 26th-July 5th, limetreebelltable.ie
In Mike Finn’s new comedy, which riffs on Limerick’s increasing gentrification, a property developer threatens to remove a beloved record store, rallying the city’s impassioned vinyl collectors to its defence. Pat Shortt leads the cast.
The Black Wolfe Tone
Venue to be announced, June, fishamble.com
The often charming Ghanaian-Irish actor Kwaku Fortune, seen as a smouldering romantic in Piaf and Amelia, turns to playwrighting. Fishamble produces this anticipated play about young men struggling with intergenerational trauma.
Amelia
Venue to be announced, October, blueraincoat.com
For its sixth play about explorers, Sligo’s adventurous Blue Raincoat company looks at Amelia Earhart’s final flight. Director Niall Henry deployed stately puppetry for his plays about seaborne journeys. This one takes to the sky via aerial dance.
Connie
Royal Cinema, Limerick, October, joanneryan.ie
The playwrights Joanne Ryan and Ann Blake throw open Limerick’s 19th-century Royal Cinema – closed for 25 years – for this exciting promenade play about Constance Smith, the Limerick actor who starred in Hollywood films in the 1950s.
Deidamia
Wexford Festival Opera, October, wexfordopera.com
An audacious attempt at the work that drove Handel to quit opera, which Wexford Festival Opera says is an unfairly neglected work. It certainly isn’t boring, as Greek mythological heroes are disguised in drag (leading Ulysses to unknowingly flirt with his son-in-law, Achilles).
Moulin Rouge! The Musical
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, November 20th-January 10th, 2026, bordgaisenergytheatre.ie
Baz Luhrmann’s near-psychedelic film gets transposed to the nightclub subterrain of Cabaret, though this musical is insistently uplifting. In belle-epoque Paris, Christian, an American composer, falls in love with a French nightclub star. He wants to be the world’s greatest composer of love stories. Touchingly, the musical sets out to go the distance with him, using its jukebox structure to travel through a huge range of love songs, from the 19th-century opera of Jacques Offenbach to Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, as well as songs released since the 2001 movie, with numbers by Lorde and Regina Spektor. The stage design is miraculous. Everything’s intensely romantic.
The Good Luck Club
Venue and dates to be announced, anuproductions.ie
The title of this intriguing offering from Anu refers to the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake, the private operation set up during the early years of the State to finance the country’s medical institutions. Collaborating with the National Archives of Ireland, director Louise Lowe is expected to take audiences through the murkier depths of an organisation entangled with wealthy gamblers. There was never an inquiry into the sweepstakes during its 60 years, but Anu’s play sounds as if it may have the critical approach of an investigation.
