The stunning Dublin Theatre Festival is set to return in 2024 with an incredible array of queer highlights. This year’s festival includes over 30 productions, featuring new voices as well as familiar faces, and a wealth of Irish and international work, exploring stories about family, identity, migration, climate, colonial legacies, conflict and its resolution.

The 2024 Dublin Theatre Festival will see world premieres of new Irish work and acclaimed international productions, showcasing artists exploring the issues that define our times domestically and globally, in vital and engaging performances in locations across the capital and throughout the greater Dublin area. This year’s programme also strives to be ever more accessible with initiatives such as Aviva’s 10 for 10 (which will see 10% of tickets for select festival productions be available for €10 to under 30s, unwaged, freelance artists and arts workers).

Here are some highlights from this year’s incredible programme:

Trifled – Caitlin Magnall-Kearns
Oct 1 – 12
The New Theatre
€15 – €25

At The New Theatre, Trifled by queer writer Caitlin Magnall-Kearns tells the story of Jen, a bolshy young Northern Irish woman who is housebound with agoraphobia and trying to make the best of a sticky situation. Her days revolve around watching daytime TV and filming niche pornographic content for her profile on OnlyFans until one day, a heartbroken English university lecturer lands on her doorstep.
Trifled charts their blossoming friendship, in this brutally honest, darkly comedic two-hander about sex work, mental illness and custard.

Amelia – Dee Roycroft
Sept 26 – Oct 5
Project Arts Centre (Cube)
€15 – €25

From Dee Roycroft, Amelia is a solarpunk play about birds, migration and leaving home, set in an offline future where actors make theatre sustained by radical hope despite carbon quotas and power cuts. In the future of our collective imagining, we will still dance, we will still sing. We will continue to love.

One morning, something flies into the window of a house in the west of Ireland, bringing chaos to a small family living there. On the edge of an ocean, in a world full of weather forecasts and seed arks, four characters reach into possibility, into new dreams of living.

Find Your Eyes – Benji Reid
Oct 10 – 12
O’Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College
€20 – €40

Pioneer of hip-hop theatre turned award-winning photographer Benji Reid mixes Afro-futurist imagery with hard-hitting tales from his life and adventures in a unique show that unfolds before your very eyes. Let him take you behind the scenes on an emotional rollercoaster where conflict meets beauty and the stage becomes his studio. Watch as Benji opens up on some of the most moving episodes of his life, and uses them to inspire his art.

This passionate piece draws on Benji’s work both as an award-winning photographer and pioneer of hip-hop theatre – bringing dancers and photography into the fold to create images in real time in front of his audience. Journeying through highs and lows, Find Your Eyes explores how we make sense of the world through our stories and our art.

The Guardian praised Find Your Eyes, calling it “A powerful show, filled with devastating honesty and wonder.“

Last but not least, the incredible team behind THISISPOPBABY will premiere its newest production, 0800 CUPID, at the Project Arts Centre as part of the 2024 Dublin Theatre Festival. Expect a nightclub interruption and queer cabaret explosion set amidst the bright lights of London in an incredible show platforming Irish diaspora voices.

Dublin Theatre Festival runs from September 26 to October 13. Download the DTF 2024 programme HERE. Note: the dates listed above include previews.

Book online at dublintheatrefestival.ie or call +353 1 677 8899. In-person bookings can be made at Festival House, 12 Essex Street East, Dublin 2 D02 EH42.

Dublin Theatre Festival is funded by the Arts Council, Dublin City Council, with Fáilte Ireland and Fonds Podium Kunsten. Dublin Theatre Festival is supported by RTÉ Supporting The Arts, The Irish Times, Aviva, Olytico, Irish Distillers and Oriana B.

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