Two plays from an exciting Irish dramatist, winner of the Verity Bargate Award for Citysong.
BÁN is a reworking of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba set in de Valera’s Ireland. Like the sisters at its heart – bound tightly, neither open nor tender, mourning their father, surveilled by their mother. They long for escape, power, the local eligible bachelor. The question isn’t who can have which, it’s can any of them have any?
Raw and raucous, dark but not unduly despairing, BÁN is premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on its Peacock Stage as part of the 2025 Dublin Theatre Festival. It was nominated for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
Absent the Wrong is an intimate and sweeping, raw and heady play about seventy years of adoptees looking for answers.
A woman looking for her child is lied to. An artist pitches a memorial that’s never built. A landlord raises rents. A parrot disappears. (Or does it?) Thousands of children disappear. (No question this time.) There’s family reunions, collective actions, inexplicable Mormons. It’s about being the only person in the family photo who isn’t white and not daring to ask why, about having multiple heritages but knowing nothing about any of them.
It’s about Ireland, Irishness, about a century of destroying families in the name of The Family. It’s about wondering, searching, loving, losing, fighting, losing some more, and sometimes finally winning when all seems lost.
Absent the Wrong was premiered on the Abbey Theatre’s Peacock Stage as part of the 2022 Dublin Fringe Festival.
Carys D. Coburn is one of the founders of MALAPROP, whose work has won acclaim in Ireland and beyond.
