HISTORY OF THE FESTIVAL

Dublin Theatre Festival is Europe’s oldest specialist theatre festival and has been on the world's Festival calendar since 1957!

The Festival stages major international theatre of scale, and has hosted productions by the world’s most highly regarded artists, while also premiering work by the giants of Irish theatre. The Irish programme in the past has been made up of shows by some of Ireland’s most respected artists including Seamus Heaney, Roddy Doyle, Brian Friel, Sebastian Barry, Enda Walsh and Tom Murphy. International artists who have appeared in the festival include, Ciarán Hinds, Vanessa Redgrave, James Cromwell, Neve Campbell and Geoffrey Rush. Within the theatre festival, we present many different programme strands which incorporate everything from music to dance, from cutting edge theatre to the biggest shows on Broadway! Our mandate is simple. If its the best in the world, its coming to the Festival!

Asides from hundreds of main-stage productions, we also present a multitude of special events which includes masterclasses from the world's top practitioners, artist development programmes, film screenings, symposiums, schools workshops and panel discussions.

In 2011, the Festival presented 553 performances in 25 venues from and set Dublin city ablaze with the most invigorating exciting theatre in the world. Take a look at our Festival Videos section to get a feel of some of the shows we presented this year.

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