Toots: “We were happy then. Why can’t we be happy now?

Desmond: “Because you’re growing up my dear, you’re growing up.”

A group of young Dubliners work and play hard, flirt wildly, fall in love, and trade devastatingly witty insults. These characters at the heart of Mary Manning’s coming-of-age satire Youth’s the Season -?  feel startlingly contemporary.

Written when the playwright was 26 and first performed in 1931, this play explores life for privileged young Irish people between the two world wars. Mary Manning’s plays were extremely popular with audiences of their time and 2025 will offer the opportunity to revisit this precious gem from the Irish theatre canon. As Abbey Artistic Director Caitríona McLaughlin says, ”I believe the combination of Sarah Jane Scaife and Mary Manning is a thrilling prospect, and I cannot wait to bring this production before an audience.”

Commenting on the play, Sarah Jane Scaife said: “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.” 

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.

*A line from John’s Gay’s The Beggar Opera (1728).

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.

A sneak peek at the original script 

With thanks to the playwright’s family