Our Spring Summer Season brochure is out! Artistic Director, Des Kennedy, is thrilled to launch his first season at The Everyman.
REMAKING HISTORY
As the new Artistic Director of The Everyman, I am excited to share my first season of work with you. Soon after arriving last September, I was clearing out a desk and in the bottom drawer found an old programme for Brian Friel’s Translations from when The Everyman Playhouse was at the Father Matthew Hall. It was part of a season of big productions of seminal 20th century plays and I was inspired by the boldness and ambition of the programming.
Over the past few months whilst working with the brilliant team at the theatre and getting to know our audiences and volunteers, I’ve learned there is a hunger for the big plays and dramas to sit alongside our wonderful touring work. These two ideas – history and drama – have guided the programming for my inaugural season: major productions of visionary plays that ask big questions.
EVERYMAN MADE
The Everyman is a beautiful and iconic venue that plays host to some of Ireland’s best touring work. With the generous support of The Arts Council and Cork City Council, we will move into a new era where The Everyman also becomes known nationally and internationally for our in-house productions. With this season, we are launching EVERYMAN MADE: world-class theatre made by The Everyman for Cork and beyond.
Our first EVERYMAN MADE season includes Making History by Brian Friel, a fascinating and rarely seen drama about Hugh O’Neill and the events before and after the Battle of Kinsale. I am delighted to be working with several Cork actors in my first production here as director. It will be followed by Irish writer Nancy Harris’s family thriller The Beacon, which is set in West Cork and will have its long-awaited Cork premiere. International theatre and opera director Daniel Kramer will create a naughty, moving and subversive late night political cabaret Happy Hour, which will be presented as part of Cork Midsummer Festival in June. We will also be partnering with Annabelle Comyn, who directed Landmark and The Everyman’s hugely successful Asking for It, and her company Hatch on a co-production of Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, a radical, funny play about four retired ladies enjoying tea together in a garden as they contemplate the end of the world.
THEATRE AND OPERA
Highlights in our programme of touring work include Laura Whitmore in the stage adaptation of international bestseller The Girl on the Train; a stage adaptation of the hugely popular Claudia Caroll novel The Secrets of Primrose Square; a political drama about a miscarriage of justice in the Guildford Four biopic play The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong, starring Cork actor Don Wycherley; and NI Opera’s beautiful one person Poulenc opera La Voix Humaine, based on the play by Jean Cocteau.
MUSIC AND LIVE ENTERTAINMENT
We are thrilled to welcome several headliner comedians – Jason Manford, Chris McCausland, Ardal O’Hanlon – as well as some of the most exciting musical acts around – Eddi Reader, Jamie Duffy, and our ever-popular EVERYMAN MADE quarterly singalong Sunday Songbook.
Theatre is about making stories, making community, making memories, making music.
I am proud to welcome you to The Everyman’s Spring Summer 2025 programme.
Let’s Make…
DES KENNEDY, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
