We’re inviting you to join us in the Abbey Bar to do your day’s writing work here, in community with other theatre artists. Pen to paper. Fingers to keyboard. However you like to get it done.

We have a different guest playwright with us every month as a host. They are trying to write something too. They’ll take some time out for a Q&A before lunch to share reflections about their writing process, answer your questions, and talk about how they like to get it done.

This isn’t a workshop – it’s a quiet, co-working gathering that ring-fences time for you to write. There aren’t any craft exercises or sharing of work. It’s an opportunity for inspiration, solidarity and for getting your idea down on paper. It’s free and open to playwrights and performance makers of any experience level. You can be writing a play, a blurb, a funding application or a secret something you aren’t ready to talk about yet.

What to expect 

10am – 10:30am: Pick your seat, have a coffee, get comfortable and chat to your fellow writers

10:30am – 12.30pm: Quiet writing time

12:30pm – 1:30pm Q & A with our guest playwright about their writing process

1:30pm – 2:30pm: Lunch break

2:30pm – 4.00pm: Quiet writing time

Please note: This event takes place in the Abbey Bar. We have tables, chairs, high stools and benches. You’ll need to bring your laptop, and we recommend you bring it charged as plugs are limited. We’re a busy working theatre so the work space won’t be silent – this will work best for you if you like a bit of background noise while you write. The Abbey Bar is only accessible via stairs. Tickets are limited to one per person.

2025 Dates 

• 10th November – Marina Carr
• 8th December – Dan Colley – registration now open

December Guest Playwright: Dan Colley 

Dan Colley is a theatre and film maker with a particular focus on devised ensemble work, adaptation and theatre for young audiences. Dan’s creative practice involves long periods of research and development with key collaborators from an early stage. Dan is interested in the slipperiness of realities and form.

His play Lost Lear won the Scotsman Fringe First award at Edinburgh 2025, where it was presented at Traverse Theatre. Premiering at Dublin Theatre Festival in 2022, it has since toured to the US, UK and New Zealand and has been described as “an astonishing piece of theatre” by the Financial Times in one of 22 five-star reviews for the show. Lost Lear was selected for the Prospero NEW platform, to enable European touring.

His adaptation of A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez premiered in 2019 and was nominated for two Irish Times Theatre Awards and four Dublin Fringe Awards, including ‘Best Production’. It has since had over 200 performances and been presented in New York, London’s Unicorn Theatre, Scotland’s Imaginate Festival and the Sydney Opera House.

His debut film The Painted Man was in the official selection of the Galway Film Fleadh and was nominated for ‘Best Arthouse Short’ in Fastnet Film Festival.

As Artistic Director of Collapsing Horse (2013-19) he directed nine original productions, created a series of ten radio plays, and an exhibition in the National Museum of Ireland. Dan was Co-Artistic Director of the Kilkenny Cat Laughs comedy festival from 2017-19.

Dan was the Creative Director of Danse Macabre, a large-scale processional street theatre piece for Macnas. He was awarded the Arts Council’s of Ireland’s Next Generation Bursary Award in 2016. He is Theatre Artist in Residence in the Riverbank Arts Centre, he was appointed by the Minister for Culture to be a member of the Expert Advisory Group for Creative Youth, and is on the board of the Dublin Fringe Festival.

Dan lives and works between Dublin and Newbridge, Ireland.

November Guest Playwright:  Marina Carr 

Marina Carr’s plays to date are Ullalloo, 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; 16 Possible Glimpses, 2009; Hecuba, 2015; iGirl, 2021; Girl on an Altar, 2022-3; Audrey or Sorrow, 2024; The Map of Argentina, 2024 and The Boy: A Two-Play Theatrical Experience 2025. Adaptations are Anna Karenina (from Tolstoy’s novel), 2016; Blood Wedding (a new version of Lorca’s play), 2019; and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, 2021. Plays for children are Meat and Salt, 2003 and The Giant Blue Hand, 2007.

Her work has been produced by the Abbey Theatre, the Gate, Druid, Landmark, the Royal Court, Wyndham’s Theatre, the RSC, the Almeida, the Kiln, the MacCarter Theatre, San Diego Rep, and Milwaukee rep. She is 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 Mary Gordon 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 Windham-Campbell Prize 2017 for her body of work, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the American/Ireland Fund Award, the E.M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Macaulay Fellowship, and the Puterbaugh Fellowship. She is a member of Aosdána.   

Carr has taught at Trinity College Dublin, at Villanova, and at Princeton; and currently she is an Associate Professor at Dublin City University. Carr is published by The Gallery Press, Nick Hern Books and Faber & Faber.