The Alice Project review: Kilkenny witch-hunt story reaches thrilling finale
Kilkenny Arts Festival: City turns its history into theatre with huge, largely local cast. It’s a visually stunning spectacle
Kilkenny Arts Festival
The Last Tape review: Beckett’s language breathes alongside the music in compelling curio
Kilkenny Arts Festival: Hybrid form soon becomes cumbersome, but operatic adaptation of Krapp’s Last Tape still intrigues
The Curing Line review: Five-star reminder of why we go to the theatre, or why we go out at all
Kilkenny Arts Festival: New fever dream of an opera by composer Michael Gallen draws on Irish folk tradition of healers gifted with ‘the cure’
The Last Tape: Beckett foray into opera comes to Kilkenny in hybrid form
Mark Padmore sings the role of Krapp and Conor Lovett speaks it in this Gare St Lazare Ireland adaptation, directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett
‘We had to bring a live rooster to the healer. She used its blood to make a poultice’
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2026: The Curing Line, Michael Gallen’s new opera, has grown out of his study of Irish folk cures
Event guide: Kilkenny Arts Festival, Opeth, and the other best things to see in Ireland in the week ahead
August 1st-7th, 2026: The best music, art, theatre and more coming your way
Colin Dunne: ‘I don’t want to call it a show. I don’t even want to call it a work’
For the Record, a collaboration with Becky Ní Éallaithe and Ultan O’Brien, combines the immediacy of a trad session with experiments in music and dance
More than 80 Irish festivals to watch out for in 2026
Here’s our round-up of cultural showcases to catch this year, from TradFest and Electric Picnic to West Cork Literary Festival and more
Alexander’s Feast at Kilkenny Arts Festival review: Perfect tale for Handel becomes perfect choice for Irish Baroque Orchestra
Conductor Peter Whelan’s artistic appetite and energy are on full display in an evening of impressive playing and singing
Secret Byrd at Kilkenny Arts Festival review: Exquisite singing, quietly searing playing
At the Black Abbey, the Gesualdo Six and Fretwork give a performance that could hardly be more compelling
Kilkenny Arts Festival review: Spellbinding drama about first woman accused of witchcraft in Ireland
Theatre: The Alice Project tells the legend of Dame Alice Kyteler and her unfortunate servant Petronella
Kilkenny Arts Festival review: Depth of writing is unmatched by the music in this Savita Halappanavar opera
Theatre: In Custom of the Coast the singers have presence. The stories feel relevant. So why is it problematic?
Kilkenny Arts Festival review: Viol recital by Fahmi Alqhai spans from 16th century to a pallid Purple Haze
Demonstration of this ancient instrument in all its guises moves through a wide repertoire
What Are You Afraid Of? at Kilkenny Arts Festival: Peter Hanly’s stage-fright journey is provoking, enlightening and enriching
Lynne Parker directs her Rough Magic colleague with sensitivity and sureness and nuance, as well as a deft comic touch
Cities of the World: Around the globe in 282 artworks
Kathy Prendergast and Chris Leach are showing their work together for the first time at a special exhibition opening at the Kilkenny Arts Festival
Event guide: The Weir, Kilkenny Arts Festival and other best things to do in Ireland this week
August 2nd-8th, 2025: The best movies, music, art and more coming your way this week
From Savita Halappanavar to Anne Bonny: Damning indictment of the treatment of women through the ages shows its always been this way
Paul Muldoon and Kamala Sankaram’s new opera Custom of the Coast gives voice to Halappanavar and Bonny in powerful narratives that run alongside each other, until they collide unexpected ways
Fedora Prize 2025: Irish composer Michael Gallen wins €100,000 award for new opera
The Curing Line, which is due to premiere at Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2026, has scooped one of the world’s largest opera awards
Festivals in Ireland 2025: From Longitude to All Together Now – a guide to 80 of the best
From Brigit and Dublin Lunar New Year to Culture Night, Space Week and Cork Jazz Festival, here’s our round-up of cultural showcases to catch this year
Peter Hanly was one of Ireland’s most recognisable actors. Then he vanished
More than a decade after his last appearance, the actor has found a way to talk about what happened - and from a startling place
Samson Tsoy: Clean, eager playing overlooks what’s most important in Beethoven’s final piano sonatas
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: The Kazakh pianist projects too much and too readily. None of these sonatas needs such advocacy
Pavel Kolesnikov: A disappointingly egotistical approach to Bach’s Goldberg Variations
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: The Russian pianist is extraordinarily resourceful, but his style says far too much about him and too little about the composer
Samson Tsoy & Pavel Kolesnikov: Always absorbing take on Rite of Spring sounds as if it’s from a parallel universe
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: In the four-hand version of Stravinsky’s work, contrasts are starker and the music’s rhythmic complexities come to the fore
Irish Chamber Orchestra: Deep, detailed performances in a setting that brings out the best in Vaughan Williams’s fantasia
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: The programme features Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Errollyn Wallen’s Dances for Orchestra
Trade/Mary Motorhead review: Compelling double bill reveals Emma O’Halloran’s impressive instinct for opera
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: Operas were originally plays by the writer and actor Mark O’Halloran
Light Up the Castle: ‘We’ll project an image of Kilkenny Castle back on to itself, then do all sorts of fun things’
Six Sides Sawn, Jack Phelan’s new audiovisual show, will bring Kilkenny Castle’s walls to life for the city’s arts festival
The Guide: Kilkenny Arts Festival, Fatboy Slim and other events to see, shows to book, and ones to catch before they end
August 3rd-9th: The best movies, music, art and more coming your way this week
Emma O’Halloran: ‘Why do all the women die in opera? I really wanted to do something that’s not that’
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: In Trade/Mary Motorhead, O’Halloran uses music to explore a transactional relationship between two men and also to transcend the confines of a prison cell
‘I was in a coma for weeks. Now I don’t sweat the small stuff. I don’t suffer from despair’
Kilkenny Arts Festival director Olga Barry has overcome health scares but is looking for new accommodation at age of 50 after renting for 34 years
Barry Douglas review: When he gets the bit between his teeth he’s one of the most exciting pianists around
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2023: There was a sense of a raw force of nature about Douglas’s recital at St Canice’s Cathedral on Monday
Carducci String Quartet: Kilkenny Arts Festival audience clearly appreciates this passionate, emotionally engaged playing
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2023: In a chalk-and-cheese programme, the players’ fondness for fullness and heartiness of tone is a little too strongly in evidence
Migration Sonata: United by a common physical language
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2023: The choreographer John Scott brings Ukrainian and Brazilian migrants together in this spirited dance
The Local: Debs night, 1992, and a community’s hopes, dreams and difficulties are unfolding before us
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2023: This ambitious community play, staged in the cabaret lounge of a working bar, is at its best in its heightened, stylised moments
Camerata Kilkenny: Gorgeous tones and mesmerising command in a Bach-dominated programme
Kilkenny Arts Festival 2023: The group’s harpsichordist, Malcolm Proud, featured as a young musician at the first festival, back in 1974
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