Is youth really the season made for joy? Set in newly independent Ireland, a group of young Dubliners gather to celebrate Desmond’s 21^st birthday. They flirt wildly, discuss the nature of love, and trade devastating insults as the party gets into full swing. However, every party has to come to an end…. You’ll never think about life in the jazz age in the same way again.

Written when Mary Manning was 26 and first performed in 1931, this startlingly modern coming-of-age satire explores the ups and downs of life for privileged young Irish people at the time. Manning’s plays were extremely popular with audiences of their time and this 2025 production offers the opportunity to revisit this precious gem from the Irish theatre canon.

Youth’s the Season -? is part of the Gregory Project at the Abbey Theatre, a body of work celebrating the legacy of Abbey Theatre co-founder Augusta Gregory.

The play’s title references a line from John Gay’s The Beggar Opera (1728), “Youth’s the Season made for Joys”.

Production images 

Images: Ros Kavanagh

Overheard in the drawing room 

If you’d like to dive into the world of 1930s Dublin, explore the National Gallery’s new exhibition 

Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. The Art of Friendship is the major new exhibition now open at the National Gallery of Ireland. Bringing together over 90 works by these ground-breaking pioneers of Irish art, this exhibition is the first joint exhibition of these two trailblazing women since they showed together in Dublin in 1924. Find out more here.

Listen back to Sarah Jane Scaife and Molly Hanly on RTÉ Radio 1’s Arena 

Sarah Jane Scaife and Molly Hanly at RTÉ for their interview on Arena. Click above to listen back.

Behind the Scenes: First Day of Rehearsals 

Images by Conn McCarrick

Sarah Jane Scaife 

Sarah Jane Scaife is Artistic Director of Company SJ which she co-founded in 2009. Company SJ produced Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words II for the Absolut Fringe Festival in Dublin before touring it to London, New York, Limerick, Enniskillen, Tokyo and Paris. In 2013 along with Rough For Theatre 1 it became the first in a series of work entitled Beckett in the City, which sought to insert the writings of Beckett into the architectural and social spaces of the city of Dublin. In 2014 she directed Beckett in the City: Fizzles for the Dublin Fringe Festival and in 2015 she added Beckett in the City: The Women Speak which was performed in Dublin and New York. In 2018 she presented Beckett’s prose piece Company, for the Dublin Theatre Festival with Raymond Keane as performer.

In 2021, she directed Beckett sa Chreig: Laethanta Sona (Happy Days), a site specific production on the island of Inis Oírr and in Dublin. Bríd Ní Neachtain won Best Actress for this role at the Irish Times Theatre Awards 2022 in this co-production between Company SJ and The Abbey Theatre. In 2021 and 2022, she co-directed The Long Christmas Dinner with Raymond Keane as the Christmas production on the Peacock stage at the Abbey Theatre. She recently directed Joanne Ryan’s In Two Minds for Fishamble, in the 2023 DTF and in The Edinburgh Fringe in 2024.

Sarah Jane is very passionate about the work of Dublin playwright Mary Manning and has been working towards a production of Youth’s The Season -? for the last decade. Commenting on the play, Sarah Janesaid: “When I read Youth’s The Season -? I was really surprised at how different the world it presented felt… It was from a young, female, urban perspective. It was funny but in a caustic way, which felt very recognisable to me. The sense of angst, boredom and frustration for what society had on offer to young women or young men who didn’t conform to the stereotype of Irish society, was familiar in a very real way for me. What is so interesting today is recognising that all the same frustrations, the fears of war, the anxiety of being different or not fitting in that are experienced by the youth today, are written into this play which was written by a young woman in her early twenties, in 1930.”

Cast announcement 

A sneak peek at the original script 

With thanks to the playwright’s family