With just days before the 2026 Dublin Theatre Festival kicks off, we’ve met up with a few of the brilliant queer creatives behind some of this year’s productions. Read on to find out more about the creative process that led to some of the programme’s standout shows.

RADIO BETTE
Opening this year’s festival is the world premiere of RADIO BETTE, a fun and irreverent show brought to Dublin by one of New York’s most exciting theatre companies, The Goat Exchange. Taking a rare 1951 radio recording of All About Eve as a starting point, the company has created an entirely new piece of live theatre that plays with performance, gender, celebrity and transformation.

One of the standout actors who is part of the extraordinary ensemble behind RADIO BETTE is Roberta Colindrez, known for originating the role of Joan in the Tony Award-winning Fun Home, as well as notable performances in Eric and A League of Their Own. Born in Mexico, Roberta discovered theatre at a young age and immediately fell in love with it. After starting her career in an experimental theatre company, she went to work in off-Broadway and Broadway, as well as in film and television, proving to be a multifaceted artist.

As she gears up to star in RADIO BETTE at the Dublin Theatre Festival, Roberta spoke to us about what audiences can expect from the show: “RADIO BETTE is a piece about actors doing a staged reading of the movie All About Eve and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, two Bette Davis films.”

In the show, she plays “Karen, who is the wife of the playwright in All About Eve. She brings in Eve Harrington, who’s this huge fan of stage actress Margo Channing.”

Full of fun and mischief, RADIO BETTE was conceived through a complex collaborative process by The Goat Exchange. “There’s been some challenges because we’re really conceiving this play from scratch,” Roberta shared. “And it’s really collaborative and there’s a lot of us”.

“It’s a lot of voices and a lot of collaboration. And at times, that’s fantastic, and at times it’s tricky just because you have different ideas of the same thing,” she said. “But I think that also has, for me personally at least, created the best parts of this, which is doing a stumble through and looking and thinking, ‘Wow, okay, we have something.’ That’s really gratifying.”

On the topic of premiering this show at the Dublin Theatre Festival, Roberta said: “I knew that we were going to the Dublin Theatre Festival. I didn’t know we were opening the Theatre Festival. And that’s such a huge honour to be highlighted in this way.

“Sometimes that kind of news makes people nervous, but for all of us, we’re feeling really, really, really fortunate and really excited to start the festival.”

Get tickets to see RADIO BETTE in The Gaiety Theatre here.

 

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Without Distinction of Sex
Another highlight of this year’s programme is Without Distinction of Sex, a powerful piece blending spoken text, choral song, and dance. Written and directed by author Veronica Coburn, the show reckons with gender, power and the unfinished fight for equality in Ireland.

It all started with a question. “Why do we have Article 41 in our constitution?” Veronica asked. “Why do we have an article, in 2026, that describes the feminine as woman and mother and dictates or utters a preference for women to be at home? And that they should be supported to stay at home, that they don’t have to go through economic necessity into the workforce to the neglect of her duties in the home.”

In order to create a show that could explore the depths of the impact of Article 41 in Irish society, Veronica brought together theatre professionals and ordinary people in a 10-week workshop. “I’m very interested in participatory practice. That’s where professional practice lines up with people who aren’t professional artists,” she shared.

The result was an ambitious piece of theatre that fused performance, art and politics. “A really key point for me in the evolution of it was, ‘Can you present all aspects? How wide is your lens? Can you represent all voices?’,” the director said.

“And really the piece is about identity,” she continued. “It’s about national identity. It’s about individual identity, and it’s about saying, ‘We want the space’. In terms of the feminine, we want to take space, to be all that we can be and not a reduced life.”

Article 41 was added to the Irish Constitution in 1937. Before that year, the constitutional text was very different, as Veronica notes. “It said, ‘Every person without distinction of sex shall within the limits of the jurisdiction of the Irish Free State enjoy the privileges and be subject to the obligations of such citizenship.’ Every person without distinction of sex. That was in the 1922 Constitution. Thereafter, they promptly started eroding it and picking at it until 1937.”

Since then, things have of course changed. “I understand that the spirit of Article 41 isn’t as strong as it was, but it is still in our Constitution. We live in a society that is riddled with the influence of all of that history,” Veronica said.

“And in many ways we made great leaps with things like Marriage Equality and Repeal. I remember Marriage Equality. I remember thinking it was the first time, in a very many decades, where I felt hopeful about the country. That I felt this perhaps could be the country that I want to live in. I thought there was hope for us, and I felt the same on Repeal. And I think it is a good thing to make those leaps and to have those changes, but then it’s about how do you really follow through on those promises?”

Without Distinction of Sex is about exploring how the legacy of Article 41 still shapes Ireland today, how it reduced women to domestic and reproductive roles, erasing unmarried, queer, trans and non-conforming lives. Bringing a show of this magnitude at the Dublin Theatre Festival is no small feat. “You have to rise to the challenge,” Veronica said.

“It’s really exciting because I think within festivals, people come to see things that they wouldn’t ordinarily come to see. And you get to put work in places that perhaps ordinarily you wouldn’t get. It’s very hard to mount a production of this scale. So with that support and in this context, it’s a fantastic opportunity to realise a piece of work that otherwise would be very difficult.”

Get tickets to see Without Distinction of Sex at the Draíocht Main Auditorium here.

 

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Lourdes! The Musical
For theatre goers who are looking for a fun night which will also rip their heart out, the Dublin Theatre Festival has Lourdes! The Musical in store. A musical about miracles and the people who make them happen, the show was written by Xnthony, the brilliant mind behind the award-winning musical Oliver Cromwell is Really Very Sorry.

Choosing the same art form for a brand new story, the playwright explained how musical fit the criteria for this show perfectly. “It makes sense to me because the Church is so theatrical,” he said. “Mass and ritual are so theatrical that telling a pilgrimage story through song made sense to me.”

Lourdes! The Musical follows a young gay man and a trans woman whose lives lead them to a pilgrimage to the famous religious site. The first bud of an idea came to Xnthony in 2022, when he was just lying in bed with his partner. “I thought this was a really interesting frame in which to explore Catholicism in the 21st century, faith in the 21st century,” he said.

In the four years that it took to complete the project, life had a way of influencing Xnthony’s creative process. “I thought it was going to be kind of a takedown of the Church, like a really angry piece about how evil the church is. But it developed into something far more personal,” he shared.

“In four years, a lot changed. I lost my best friend to cancer and the show responded to that. It became an exploration of mortality and grief and how we care for each other, and how we might be looking for miracles.

“We might go to Lourdes to find a miracle, but actually the miracle is the community and the people that we have around us to help us get through the difficult times.”

The final result is a surprising musical that fuses reflections on faith and grief with “amazing pop bangers and power ballads and a DJing nun”, Xnthony said. “People shouldn’t expect it to be a piss-take of Lourdes. They should expect it to be somewhat respectful.

“It’s negative about the machinery of the church, but it’s not negative about personal faith, and I think that might surprise people,” the playwright said. “It really invites you to think about your own personal faith, whether that’s your faith in your cat or your faith in a woman, god or goddesses or tarot cards.”

Xnthony spoke about how the support of the Dublin Theatre Festival has been invaluable in bringing this show to life. “We’re not an institution. We’re not the Abbey Theatre, so it’s high stakes. If something goes wrong, it’s on me. It’s on my amazing producer, Hannah,” he shared. “It has brought challenges, but it’s so brilliant because by doing it ourselves, we don’t have to compromise the things that really matter to us. We’re really focused on bringing queer stories to the front.”

Buy tickets to see Lourdes! The Musical at the Civic Theatre here.

 

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For more highlights of the Dublin Theatre Festival, read this article or check out the full programme here.