Gate Theatre announces five productions for 2027 season

The Gate Theatre has announced five productions for its 2027 season, led by the world premiere of End Times by David Ireland. The play, directed by Katie Posner of Paines Plough, opens in February. The Gate describes it as a darkly comic, deeply humane drama about a successful Belfast actor preparing for a BBC interview about the murder of his father during the Troubles.

Mary Jane, by Amy Herzog, receives its European premiere in June, directed by Caroline Byrne. The Tony-nominated play follows a single mother in New York caring for her chronically ill young son. Artistic director Róisín McBrinn calls it a love letter to mothers and carers.

McBrinn will direct Philadelphia, Here I Come! by Brian Friel, which first premiered in 1964 as a Gate production. Its protagonist, Gar O'Donnell, is split into Gar Public and Gar Private as he weighs life in his father's Co Donegal shop against a move to the United States. McBrinn says it is painful that so many of Friel's themes still resonate, as thousands of young people leave Ireland every year.

In April the theatre will stage George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession, directed by Sara Joyce. The Gate says the production will be explosive. The play, initially banned from public performance, centres on a strained mother-daughter relationship.

The fifth production is Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Clint Dyer, a former deputy artistic director of the UK National Theatre. It will be staged as part of Dublin Theatre Festival.

Separately, in January, as part of the Gatecrashes programme, Ciarán Hinds appears in Igor Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, directed by Emma Finnegan.