Stage

Dublin Fringe Festival 2023: 562 performances in 32 venues, including 45 world and 18 Irish premieres

This year’s festival, featuring everything from sound-and-light installations to wrestling, begins on September 9th

Dublin Fringe Festival 2023: The Garden of Shadows, by Jony Easterby

Deirdre Falvey's face
Deirdre Falvey
Wed Jul 19 2023 - 19:00

Dublin Fringe Festival has unveiled its line-up for this year’s event, in September – and it features 562 performances in 32 venues, including 45 world premieres, 18 Irish premieres and nine Dublin premieres.

The city’s 29th fringe festival is an eclectic jam of new art experiences and live performances across the capital over 16 days and nights. Its 79 events include after-dark cabaret, clubbing and wrestling, audio adventures, immersive experiences and live art installations, comedy, theatre, music, dance, circus and physical performance, and events for children and younger people. More than 560 artists will draw audiences through the windows of cramped Dublin apartments, connect with the bloom of nature in urban spaces or bring audiences into secret spaces.

The festival’s new director, David Francis Moore, describes the artists in this year’s line-up as “catalysts, expertly interweaving their narratives into the very fabric of Dublin. We are so thrilled to be able to bring their unique and extraordinary work to the city – and to offer Dubliners and visitors many new gems of the best new live performances in the country.”

Dublin Fringe Festival 2023: Hothouse. Photograph: Pato Cassinoni

Highlights include Hothouse, a new play staged by Malaprop (originally commissioned by Thisispopbaby for its Where We Live festival, in 2020, but scuppered by Covid) that addresses climate breakdown and how our grandchildren may remember us for what we did to this world.

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Following his sell-out Remnant Ecologies at last year’s fringe, Jony Easterby’s big outdoor installations return to the National Botanic Gardens with The Garden of Shadows, a new immersive sound-and-light installation.

The cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond and the American countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo team up for Only an Octave Apart, expressing queer identities through interpretations of classical, pop, and hybrids of both, in a musical fantasia crossing opera and politically subversive cabaret.

Egg, the Dublin queer cabaret, present Egg: The Proclamation of the Irish Republegg, part DIY cabaret, part musical political rally. You’re Needy (Sounds Frustrating) by Tasteinyourmouth is an intimate performance for one audience member at a time, in a cottage with the protagonist in her bathroom taking a long, hard look at herself.

Dublin Fringe Festival 2023: The Dan Daw Show. Photograph: Hugo Glendinning

The Dan Daw Show is an intimate evening of dance and play that explores bodies, power and submission in a show that is intense, tender and about care, intimacy, resilience and joy. The comedian Jason Byrne is in his first play, Paddy Lama: The Shed Talks, directed by Brokentalkers’ Feidlim Cannon, about his father, Paddy Byrne.

Noke Theatre’s Drainage Scheme, set in Munster in the 18th century, a time of radical change, is a rural drama mixing experimental music and performance techniques, while focusing on a family struggling to survive.

Dublin Fringe Festival 2023: Mosh. Photograph: Richard Mooney and Luke Carparelli

Ahmed, with Love’s Dublin Fringe debut, Clash at the Quays!, sees live music meet the wacky world of professional wrestling. Galway’s Moonfish Theatre presents The Crow’s Way for audiences aged eight and up. Rachel Ní Bhraonáin choreographs a new show, Mosh, with live music, interviews, humour and a lot of headbanging, to dive into the misunderstood subculture of moshing.

Dublin Fringe Festival runs from Saturday, September 9th, to Sunday, September 24th

Dublin Fringe Festival