Dublin Theatre Festival 2026: Animals
Liz FitzGibbon and Manus Halligan in Animals. Image, Ros Kavanagh
****
Talk about contentious. For acolytes, Animals is the best thing since sliced bread. For heathens, it'll just about pass as stale toast. Neutrals likely to fall into either camp. Based on seven stories from the critically acclaimed short fiction of Blindboy Boatclub, adapted and directed by Dan Colley, Animals has a relationship with truth, facts and reality that is never entirely stable, whatever truth, facts and reality might be. Getting off to a cracking start with a multi-faceted, send-up of Blindboy's podcast in which Blindboy interviews himself. Or, rather, selves. The masked celebrity splintering and replicating all over the auditorium. So begins a roller-coaster of mayhem and meta-theatricality. Owen Boss's set, puppets and family mask, along with Saileóg O'Halloran's costumes and Suzie Cummins's lights, fostering wild, endlessly changing realities. Even as, ironically, Animals proves much more potent when its heightened theatricality is used sparingly and words take centre stage.
Emer Dineen, John Doran, Ashleigh Dorrell, Jeanne Nicole Ní Áinle, Liz FitzGibbon, Karl Quinn and Aidan Crowe in Animals.
Image, Ros Kavanagh
Like a sequence of vaudevillian sketches, with several overlapping, a story about a mistreated donkey at Christmastime cracks open the season's sentimentality before three interwoven tales take over. The first featuring chain-smoking solicitor Pamela, who talks like an extra in a Philip Marlowe novel whilst representing dodgy dog owners. Owning the stage in O'Halloran's excellent costume, with Marge Simpson-style, piled-high hair and puffing on a perma-cigarette, the scene-stealing Liz FitzGibbon is sensational. As is the irrepressible Emer Dineen as a tattooed taxi driver looking to find their place in the musclebound, male manosphere. O'Halloran's bodysuits facilitating one of Animals' funniest visual sequences. Yet potent images come no better than the man remembering being a neurodivergent child. Pat Shortt, ambling in with a fridge strapped to his back, recounting every fact in the encyclopaedia, yet forever unsure how to make sense of them, or make sense of the world in which he seems to scare people.
Manus Halligan, Ashleigh Dorrell, Jeanne Nicole Ní Áinle, Siobhán O’Connor, Liz FitzGibbon, Aidan Crowe, John Doran and Loré Adewusi in Animals. Image, Ros Kavanagh
Post-intermission a tamed, more focused theatricality takes over. Manus Halligan's stirring tale about a fairy changeling child told in the waiting area of a children's hospital highlighting overlapping realities, featuring a beautiful sequence with a cormorant. Arguably the most successful sketch is the hilarious rehearsed reading for a homoerotic play about Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins giving birth to eight-foot-tall soldiers. The aim of the play to start a riot by way of crude ideas and images which feel as offensive and impersonal as listening to someone with Tourette's. Following a gory, trying-too-hard ending, Pat Shortt climbs a ladder to deliver a cleverly orchestrated goodbye, making sure we got all the messages. A final dig at Dublin, laughable coming from Limerick, rounds out a hodgepodge of hilarious moments.
Pat Shortt in Animals. Image, Ros Kavanagh
A coattail production riding on Blindboy’s success, Animals will delight the converted even as others might be less impressed with its hilarious, often overworked theatricality. Like a conservative Monty Python, Animals has its memorable moments, but the disparity between stories and stage is never properly resolved. Some things work, and some things work brilliantly. Shortt, Halligan, Dineen and FitzGibbon heading up an impressive ensemble which includes Loré Adewusi, Aidan Crowe, John Doran, Ashleigh Dorrell, Jeanne Nicole Ní Áinle, Siobhán O'Connor, and Karl Quinn. There's no denying Animals is laugh-out-loud. And it if it’s not theatrical fine dining, it's a theatrical, jumbo breakfast roll. Very tasty indeed.
Animals, from the short stories of Blindboy Boatclub, adapted and directed by Dan Colley, runs at The Abbey Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival 2026, continuing until November 7.
For more information visit The Abbey Theatre or Dublin Theatre Festival 2026
