Gate Theatre’s 2027 season to include David Ireland premiere plus Friel and Shaw classics

Dublin theatre will also stage Mary Jane by Amy Herzog, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, and Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, featuring Ciarán Hinds

Wed Nov 11 2026 - 17:45 • 2 MIN READ

The Gate Theatre has announced five productions for its 2027 season, including the world premiere of End Times, by David Ireland, the European premiere of Mary Jane, by Amy Herzog, and a new production of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, by Brian Friel.

End Times, which will be directed by Katie Posner of the British theatre company Paines Plough, is billed as a darkly comic, deeply humane drama that follows a successful Belfast actor as he prepares for a BBC interview about the murder of his father during the Troubles. The play, which opens in February, “forces us to confront how geopolitical divides mirror our most intimate personal reckonings and questions how easy it is to move on from traumatic pasts and places”, according to the Gate.

Mary Jane, which opens in June, follows the life of a single mother in New York as she cares for her chronically ill young son while navigating a labyrinth of medical machinery, insurance hurdles and daily exhaustion – but never losing her optimism or capacity for human connection. “Mary Jane is a love letter to mothers and carers, and I’m excited for our audiences to be moved by this tender journey,” Róisín McBrinn, the Gate’s artistic director, says about the Tony-nominated play, which will be directed by Caroline Byrne.

McBrinn will direct Philadelphia, Here I Come!, whose protagonist, Gar O’Donnell, is caught – and literally divided, into Gar Public and Gar Private – between the suffocating routine of his father’s shop in Co Donegal and the prospect of a new life in the United States. “As thousands of young people leave Ireland every year, it’s painful to think that so many of Friel’s themes still resonate today,” McBrinn says of the play, which originally premiered in 1964 as a Gate production.

In January, as part of the theatre’s Gatecrashes programme, Ciarán Hinds features in The Soldier’s Tale, by Igor Stravinsky, which combines drama, poetry, music and dance to chronicle a first World War soldier who trades his violin to the Devil in return for vast riches. It will be directed by Emma Finnegan.

In April the theatre will stage what it says will be an explosive production of Mrs Warren’s Profession, George Bernard Shaw’s “controversial masterpiece” – it was initially banned from public performance – about a mother-daughter relationship that becomes strained “after the daughter discovers the true source of the wealth that funded her privileged upbringing”. Dissecting “capitalism, hypocrisy, female power and the cost of independence”, it will be directed by Sara Joyce.

The fifth production announced by the Gate is A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry. Directed by Clint Dyer, former deputy artistic director of the UK National Theatre, the 1959 play tells the story of a struggling African American family in Chicago who face new challenges when they receive a substantial life-insurance payment after the death of the family patriarach. The production will be staged as part of Dublin Theatre Festival.

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