Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Marina Carr’s plays to date are Ullaloo (1989), Low in the Dark (1991), The Mai (1994), Portia Coughlan (1996), By the Bog of Cats (1998), On Raftery’s Hill (1999), Ariel (2000), Woman and Scarecrow (2004), The Cordelia Dream (2006), Marble (2007), and 16 Possible Glimpses (2009). Her two plays for children are Meat and Salt (2003) and The Giant Blue Hand (2004). The RSC produced the world premiere of her reimagining of Hecuba at the Swan Theatre in September 2015, and in August 2015, the Abbey Theatre produced a major revival of By the Bog of Cats. Her reimagining of Anna Karenina played for two months in the Abbey Theatre’s main house, finishing at the end of January 2017. 

Her work has been produced by the Abbey Theatre, the Gate, Druid, the Royal Court, Wyndhams Theatre, the RSC, the Tricycle, the MacCarter Theatre, San Diego Rep and Milwaukee Rep, and has been translated into many languages and produced around the world. She also wrote a new, contemporary translation of Rigoletto for Opera Theatre Company, which toured Ireland in 2015, and wrote an original oratorio as part of a commission for Wicklow County Council that brought together choirs from throughout County Wicklow with solo singers and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in November 2016. 

Prizes include the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, American/Ireland Fund Award, E.M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Macaulay Fellowship, Puterbaugh Fellowship and the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize in 2017, conferred that September at an international literary festival at Yale. She is also member of Aosdána.

She has taught at Trinity, Villanova, and Princeton. Currently she lectures in the English department at Dublin City University. She is published by the Gallery Press, Nick Hern Books, and Faber & Faber.

Annabelle Comyn is an award-winning freelance theatre director, artistic director of Hatch Theatre Company, and head of MFA in theatre directing at the Lir Academy of Dramatic Arts, Ireland. 

Her theatre work includes Our New Girl (The Gate, Dublin); Ravens (Hampstead Theatre, UK); the Mick Flannery musical Evening Train (The Everyman, Cork Midsummer Festival); Asking For It (Birmingham Rep UK, Gaiety Theatre, The Everyman and Abbey Theatre, Dublin); Look Back in Anger and The Vortex (The Gate); Crestfall (The Mick Lally Theatre—Druid, Galway International Festival and The Peacock, Abbey Theatre); Helen and I (The Mick Lally Theatre—Druid and Civic, Tallaght); The Wake, Hedda Gabler, Major Barbara, The House (Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Director), and Pygmalion (Abbey Theatre); Blue /Orange, A Number (Peacock, Abbey Theatre); Dancing at Lughnasa (Lyric Theatre, Belfast); The Talk of the Town (Hatch Theatre Company/Landmark Productions and Dublin Theatre Festival); Love and Money, Further Than the Furthest Thing, Cruel and Tender, Pyrenees, and Blood and The Country (Hatch Theatre Company in association with Project Arts Centre); Contractions, The Sit (Bewley's Cafe Theatre/Dublin Fringe Festival—Bewley’s Cafe Little Gem Award nomination); Ashes and Sand (Nukutheater, Estonia); Twelfth Night (The Granary, Cork); Good-Bye Roy (Royal Court—Exposure); B22 (Royal Court—Young Writers’ Festival); The Lament For Arthur Cleary (Brockley Jack, London); and The Rock Station (Finborough). 

Opera work includes Dubliners: Counterparts and the Boarding House (Wexford/Dublin—Opera Theatre Company & Wexford Opera Festival, nominated by ITTA for best opera 2018).

Catherine W. Hollis teaches in the University of California, Berkeley’s Fall Program for Freshmen. She is a co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and Contemporary Global Literature (2021) and recently guest edited a special issue of The Virginia Woolf Miscellany on book collecting. She is the historian-bibliographer (2021-2023) of the International Virginia Woolf Society, and is the author of Leslie Stephen as Mountaineer (Cecil Woolf, 2010). Her recent essays on women in the milieu of anarchist Emma Goldman are included in Thanks For Typing: Remembering Forgotten Women in History (ed. Dresvina, 2021) and Women Making Modernism (ed. Delsandro, 2020).

Maura Bird is a young up and coming Irish actor whose recent credits include Pericles (Conal Morrison), Electra (Ronan Phelan), Dubliners (Annie Ryan), and The Well of Saints (Eoghan Carrick).

Colin Campbell is an up-and-coming Irish actor whose recent credits including Cuckoo (Soho Theatre, London), the stage production of Scotties with Theatre Gu Leor (the National Theatre of Scotland and Abbey Theatre), and the role of Pig opposite Evanna Lynch in the 20th anniversary production of Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs. Other work includes the Corn Exchange production Dublin by Lamplight, and Living Quarters, directed by Conall Morrison.

Declan Conlon is one of Ireland’s most prolific stage actors, known also for his many TV and film roles, including Turlough Norris in the long-running soap opera Fair City. His theatre credits include Anna Karenina (Abbey Theatre), Juno and the Paycock (Gate Theatre), Dancing at Lughnasa (Lyric Theatre and Gaiety Theatre), Hedda Gabler (Abbey Theatre), Improbable Frequency (Rough Magic), Uncle Vanya (Lyric Theatre), and Arthur Miller’s version of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (Gate Theatre), to name but a few.

Derbhle Crotty is an Ian Charleson and Irish Times Theatre Award-winning actress. Amongst her earliest jobs at the Abbey was a role in Marina Carr's breakthrough play The Mai in 1994, and later the lead in Carr's Portia Coughlan for Garry Hynes. Derbhle has worked extensively in London and has appeared in many National Theatre and RSC productions. In 2008 she was awarded the Irish Times Theatre Awards for best actress in the Abbey production of The Three Sisters, in which she played the part of Masha. She has recently starred in Druid’s The Cherry Orchard. Her film roles have included The Bright Side (2021), Notes On A Scandal (2006), and Inside I’m Dancing (2004).

Aoife Duffin Kerry-born actor best known for her role in Chris O’Dowd’s TV smash comedy Moone Boy. She starred in Corn Exchange’s award-winning, one-woman production of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing; other theatre work includes Taming of the Shrew (Globe Theatre, London) and Blood Wedding (Young Vic, London). Other lead TV roles include RTE’s War of Independence, What Richard Did, Dead Still, Rebellion, and Resistance.

Nick Dunning is an actor and writer who has a long, distinguished career in theatre both in England and Ireland. He is known for his roles in the movie Alexander (2004), The Tudors (2007), and The Iron Lady (2011). Other film and TV roles include Striking Out (RTÉ), Holby City (BBC), Whistleblower (RTÉ), Coronation Street (ITV), Casualty (BBC), and Midsomer Murders (ITV). Theatre work includes The Great Gatsby (Gate Theatre) , Anna Karenina (Abbey Theatre), The Homecoming (Broadway), and The Taming of the Shrew (Royal Shakespeare Company).

Olwen Fouéré is an actor, director and creative artist whose extensive practice navigates theatre, film, the visual arts, music, dance theatre and literature. A great deal of her work has originated in Ireland but in more recent years her work and her practice has spread across the globe to Australia, the USA, the UK, and several European countries. She was also an artistic director of the music group and theatre company Operating Theatre with the composer Roger Doyle. Her theatre works include Ballyturk (Enda Walsh—Abbey Theatre/New York); By The Bog Of Cats (Marina Carr, Abbey Theatre), for which she won Best Actress; Sodome, My Love (Rough Magic)—Best Actress, Irish Times Theatre Awards; Riverrun (Galway Int’l Arts Festival); The Playboy of the Western World (Druid Theatre, NY Tour), The Antigone (Project Arts Centre, Dublin); Romeo & Juliet (Royal National Theatre, London); Lady Windermere’s Fan (Gate Theatre); The Importance of Being Earnest (NI Opera); and many, many more over her amazing career trajectory. Olwen’s film works include The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Sequel (2021), Zone 414 (2020), Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018), and The Survivalist (2015). TV work includes Above Suspicion (ITV), Cursed (Netflix), Ballykissangel (BBC), The Irish RM (BBC/RTÉ), and When Reason Sleeps (RTÉ/Channel4).

Kyle Hixon has just completed filming in Ridley Scott’s most recent feature film, The Last Duel. His theatre work includes the title role in Mill Productions' Hamlet, and he recently played the lead role in a Northern Ireland tour of Blackout for the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. His other stage credits include the role of Skank in In Arabia We’d All Be Kings (Some Yank's Theatre), Phillip in Orphans (Breaking Good/Alchemy 8, Tom Meadows/Ensemble), Conall Morrison’s Borstal Boy (Gaiety Theatre), Some Baffling Monster (Dick Walsh/Pan Pan), and The Seagull and other Birds, directed by Gavin Quinn for Pan Pan. Film credits include the role of Cathal in the short film Contra, directed by Darragh Murphy for November Seven Films, and the role of Aidan in the feature film Monged, directed by Rory Mullen, David Prendiville, and Brian Quinn.