AbbeyTheatre

Sarah Jane Scaife is Artistic Director of Company SJ which she co-founded in 2009. Company SJ produced Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words II for the Absolut Fringe Festival in Dublin before touring it to London, New York, Limerick, Enniskillen, Tokyo and Paris. In 2013 along with Rough For Theatre 1 it became the first in a series of work entitled Beckett in the City, which sought to insert the writings of Beckett into the architectural and social spaces of the city of Dublin. In 2014 she directed Beckett in the City: Fizzles for the Dublin Fringe Festival and in 2015 she added Beckett in the City: The Women Speak which was performed in Dublin and New York. In 2018 she presented Beckett’s prose piece Company, for the Dublin Theatre Festival with Raymond Keane as performer.

In 2021, she directed Beckett sa Chreig: Laethanta Sona (Happy Days), a site specific production on the island of Inis Oírr and in Dublin. Bríd Ní Neachtain won Best Actress for this role at the Irish Times Theatre Awards 2022 in this co-production between Company SJ and The Abbey Theatre. In 2021 and 2022, she co-directed The Long Christmas Dinner with Raymond Keane as the Christmas production on the Peacock stage at the Abbey Theatre. She recently directed Joanne Ryan’s In Two Minds for Fishamble, in the 2023 DTF and in The Edinburgh Fringe in 2024.

Sarah Jane is very passionate about the work of Dublin playwright Mary Manning and has been working towards a production of Youth’s The Season -? for the last decade. Commenting on the play, Sarah Janesaid: “When I read Youth’s The Season -? I was really surprised at how different the world it presented felt… It was from a young, female, urban perspective. It was funny but in a caustic way, which felt very recognisable to me. The sense of angst, boredom and frustration for what society had on offer to young women or young men who didn’t conform to the stereotype of Irish society, was familiar in a very real way for me. What is so interesting today is recognising that all the same frustrations, the fears of war, the anxiety of being different or not fitting in that are experienced by the youth today, are written into this play which was written by a young woman in her early twenties, in 1930.”

Emma - Audio Described Programme Notes by AbbeyTheatre

Grania Audio Described Programme Notes by AbbeyTheatre

The Quare Fellow: Audio described programme notes by AbbeyTheatre

One of the most uniquely recognisable, and critically and popularly lauded, voices in Irish music, Radie Peat – of multi-award winning Lankum and ØXN – collaborates with the Abbey Theatre on its production of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow, lending her vocals to the lyrics of 'The Old Triangle', which ring out hauntingly throughout the performance.

Read more here: https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/the-old-triangle/

Audio Description notes for Somewhere Out There You by Nancy Harris, directed by Wayne Jordan at the Abbey Theatre.

Ghosts on demand: Audio Described programme notes by AbbeyTheatre

Ghosts: Audio Described programme notes by AbbeyTheatre

As part of the run of our new production of Moliere's Tartuffe, we initiated a series of post-show discussions on themes emerging from the new version of the play by Frank McGuinness. The discussions focussed on the origins of these themes in the play and broadened out to encompass reflections on their relevance for Ireland in the past and the present.

Our second talk covered Me Too: confronting patriarchy and sexual oppression. This conversation was explored by curator Catriona Crowe along with journalist and novelist Gene Kerrigan and journalist and writer Caelainn Hogan. In their talk they examined hypocrisy, trying to answer the question if it’s part of the Irish system of elision of difficult things.

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As part of the run of our new production of Moliere's Tartuffe, we initiated a series of post-show discussions on themes emerging from the new version of the play by Frank McGuinness. The discussions focussed on the origins of these themes in the play and broadened out to encompass reflections on their relevance for Ireland in the past and the present.

Our first talk covered Me Too: confronting patriarchy and sexual oppression.

For this talk, curator Catriona Crowe was joined on stage by Irish Times writer and columnist Roisin Ingle and Consent Project Manager with Dublin Rape Crisis Centre Sarah Monaghan. They discussed the recent Waking the Feminists campaign - how have we done since the campaign was first launched back in 2015 and is there more to be done? The panel also explored if toxic masculinity is a response to women’s attempts to defeat sexual oppression.

Facebook - @AbbeyTheatreDublin

Instagram - @AbbeyTheatreDublin

Twitter - @AbbeyTheatre