A world premiere production, BÁN is written by Carys D. Coburn and directed by Claire O’Reilly. 

A reworking of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, BÁN is faithful but not close. 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?

BÁN isn’t simply mapping Franco’s Spain onto de Valera’s Ireland – Catholic Fascism = Catholic Fascism = duh. It’s speaking to anyone anywhen who denial kept alive, but who then wished it hadn’t. (Not exclusively Irish, but VERY Irish.) It’s raw and raucous; dark but not unduly despairing; loving but not unduly merciful. 

BÁN will be part of the 2025 Dublin Theatre Festival programme and was recently nominated for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Find out more about the other plays which are part of our 2025 programme here.

Carys D. Coburn  

Carys D. Coburn was the winner of the Verity Bargate Award 2017 for Citysong – co-produced by Soho Theatre, the Abbey Theatre, and Galway International Arts Festival. Other plays include Absent the Wrong (Best Production at Dublin Fringe 2022) and HOTHOUSE (Best Production at Dublin Fringe 2023). One of the founders of MALAPROP, their work together has won acclaim for its distinctive blend of nerdiness and tenderness. Short work includes Me, Sara for the Abbey’s Priming the Canon, ALASIALIAS for Paines Plough’s Come to Where I’m From, and Our Mother, My Daughters for Draíocht Blanchardstown’s HOME Theatre. Work with young people is a major strand of their practice; they are the author of Ask Too Much of Me for the National Youth Theatre ensemble (Abbey Theatre 2019); this is a room…, for Dublin Youth Theatre (Dublin Theatre Festival 2017); and ran the inaugural ARTICULATE programme for young writers for Youth Theatre Ireland 2020-2023. They are the librettist, with Annemarie Ní Chuirreáin, of Michael Gallen’s opera Elsewhere, which premiered on the Abbey Stage in 2021, and the sole librettist of Horse Ape Bird, an Irish National Opera and Music Generation co-commission, by David Coonan. They contributed text to THISISPOPBABY’s queer cabaret extravaganza WAKE. They were the facilitator of the inaugural WEFT Studio Group, a peer mentorship and support network for Black artists and artists of colour more broadly.