Search Results for 'Dion Boucicault'

THE SHAUGHRAUN

The Galway-based company, which is due to tour North America this winter, says it wants to provide professional opportunities for writers, and women working as theatre artists on the island of Ireland, through its New Writing open call and its Marie Mullen Bursary.

No doubt with a nod to the USA’s 250th birthday last week, Druid Theatre’s 2026 season is called ‘Strange Country: Ireland in America’.

President Catherine Connolly will make a keynote address on the importance of the arts as a medium to speak truth to power at the opening of the 2026 Galway International Arts Festival next week.

Druid Theatre Company is reviving Dion Boucicault’s classic play, The Shaughraun, for this year’s Arts Festival. Its first Galway performance, in December 1876, followed sold-out runs on Broadway and in London’s West End. Though set in rural Sligo, The Shaughraun became associated with Galway, and specifically with Claddagh.

A seachrán can be a wandering vagabond, a clever rogue, maybe astray in the head as well as abroad, and the play that made the word infamous in nineteenth century America returns to Galway this summer, for the first time since 1982.

Over the course of 14 days and nights this July, Galway city and county will once again be transformed into a vibrant cultural landscape—alive with theatre, music, circus, dance, visual arts, comedy, street spectacle and ideas. This year’s Galway International Arts Festival 2026 programme, described as one of the most ambitious to date, reflects a festival that continues to grow not only in size, but in artistic depth, international reach and civic importance.

Tickets are now on sale for a staging of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten in Galway this autumn, as part of Druid’s ‘Strange Country: Ireland in America’ theatre theme for 2026.

Each year, the arrival of the Galway International Arts Festival programme feels less like a publication drop and more like a seasonal shift. Before a single ticket is bought, before a stage is lit, there it is in your hands — weighty, ink-rich, quietly electric. That physical programme, dense with possibility, signals something deeper than scheduling: it tells the brain, almost instinctively, that summer has arrived in Galway.

The announcement of the Galway International Arts Festival 2026 programme arrives with a sense of scale and confidence that underscores its position as one of Europe’s most dynamic multidisciplinary arts festivals.