When the Olympic flame for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics reaches its final destination, Milan’s San Siro Stadium on Friday, 6th February, four Irish athletes will walk out behind it. I could not be more in awe of their achievement and rigour in getting here.
The night before, on 5th February, the Abbey Theatre will open the world premiere of Mirandolina by Marina Carr, after Carolo Goldoni. This co-production with Teatro Stabile del Veneto – Teatro Nazionale Italy, and Croatian National Theatre HNK Rijeka is part of the cultural offer surrounding the Olympics, the Cultural Olympiad. This co-production brings Irish creatives and Italian and Croatian actors together to create a new work linking Irish theatre to international collaboration, history and cultural dialogue.
I am deeply proud that we were asked by Artistic Director of Fondazione Teatro Stabile del Veneto – Teatro Nazionale, Filippo Dini to be part of a cultural moment of such global significance – tied as this co-production is to the Winter Olympics – and to have the chance to join our Irish athletes, support them, and bring to the stages of northern Italy this powerful and deeply urgent play which speaks unflinchingly to the present moment. Over the weeks of the sporting events we will be performing in Treviso, Belluno, Venice, Padua, Verona and Milan.
When we speak about the Olympic Games, we often speak in the language of excellence, discipline, and physical achievement. We are also talking about something deeply theatrical. Sport, like theatre, is a live art form. It exists only in the moment of its making, in front of an audience who have gathered not just to watch, but to feel. Athletes, like actors, rehearse for years for performances that may last only minutes. They learn timing, rhythm, restraint, and when to take a risk. They understand presence—how to enter a space and claim it. On one level, every competition carries a narrative. There are protagonists and rivals, moments of tension, reversals of fortune, and the possibility of transformation. We recognise these stories instinctively because they are human stories. Victory and loss are not just outcomes: they are acts charged with meaning. Our play, an adaptation by Marina Carr of Carlo Goldoni’s 18th Century classic, La Locandiera, translated by Monica Capuani, is also rich with acts charged with meaning, rivals, tensions, and reversals of fortune.
On a personal note, coming to Treviso to work on this production has brought me closer to understanding something that baffled me for years, why, in Ireland, sports and the arts, are held within the same ministry. Perhaps it’s because the stadium and the theatre share an essential truth: the audience completes the event. The energy of the crowd, the collective breath, held or released, can shape what unfolds. So, as we prepare for next months opening and look forward to the 2026 Olympiad, we are not only preparing a sporting event. Together we are preparing a global stage—one where the body, under pressure, tells stories of courage, vulnerability and hope. In that sense, the Games are not just competition. They are performance, ritual, and celebration. Like the best theatre, they remind us who we are when we come together and that anything is possible, including an Olympic medal or four coming back to Ireland with us.
Mirandolina has its world premiere in Treviso, Italy, on Thursday, 4th February 2026, before touring to Belluno, Venice, Padua, Verona, Rijeka, and Milan. Then arriving to Dublin, it will be performed on the Abbey Stage from Friday, 28th August – Saturday, 5th September 2026, and forms part of the cultural programming around Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
