Irish acting talent was out in force in London on Thursday night as The Playboy of the Western World officially opened at the National Theatre.<\/p>\n
Nicola Coughlan, Siobh\u00e1n McSweeney and \u00c9anna Hardwicke were among those pictured at the press-night celebrations for the revival, which is playing the National’s Lyttelton Theatre.<\/p>\n
Directed by Caitr\u00edona McLaughlin, the production features Coughlan as Pegeen Mike, Hardwicke as Christy Mahon and McSweeney as Widow Quin, alongside a cast including Declan Conlon, Lorcan Cranitch, Megan Cusack and Marty Rea.<\/p>\n
Synge\u2019s darkly comic classic centres on Pegeen, whose life is upended when a young stranger arrives in her pub claiming he has killed his father. The run began previews on 4 December and continues until 28 February 2026.<\/p>\n
First staged at Dublin\u2019s Abbey Theatre in 1907, The Playboy of the Western World remains one of the best-known works of the Irish theatre canon, and this new National Theatre revival is also set to be screened in cinemas via NT Live from 28 May 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Irish acting talent was out in force in London on Thursday night as The Playboy of the Western…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":343524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-343523","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}