Galway International Arts Festival 2026: Dressing Room

Dressing Room: Image, Emilija Jefremova

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In Locations: The Landscapes of Fiction, literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick reveals how locations enrich our engagement with stories. The House of Usher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Wuthering Heights. Room. Places that become more than place names, often speaking to moral, social or cultural virtue signalling. In their evolving Rooms series, writer and director Enda Walsh and designer Paul Fahy aspire to sensoramic, immersive engagement with a different location each time. Each time a different room. Fahy’s detailed installations stories in themselves, or having stories to tell, and not simply backdrops wherein stories are told. Alas, their latest instalment, Dressing Room, didn't get the memo. Failing to meaningfully integrate Fahy’s intriguing space and Walsh’s heartfelt story right up to its too little, too late finale.

Centred on a 70 year old GAA coach for Galway Under 13s, Dressing Room spends most of its narrative describing his saddened home, distressed marriage or his ramblings through a dying town. John Olahan’s unnamed narrator walking to the local GAA dressing room to ready it for a forthcoming match. A space both private and public, shaping and forming male identities, which he only really enters in the final moments. Walsh’s sensitive dialogue capturing an old man in a fading town wondering if it was all worthwhile now life’s begun to unravel? Seeking solace in a communal space, occupied by him alone for the half hour before each game. An all male space in which emotionally constipated masculinity must find ways to express and connect.

Half loving, half living, Olohan’s pedestrian character is only ever half there, sounding like an audiobook reading rather than a performance. A verbal shimmer against Fahy’s detailed backdrop of paint flaking seediness, sweat soaked showers and a musty, fluorescent gloom. A shoddy, military green floor with wooden walking panels and benches is offset by a shambles of cups, trophies and a framed, signed jersey signifying imagined greatness. Which, like Dressing Room, is barely a symbolic echo. Looking around the small audience, all are sat with their eyes closed. Listening intently to Olahan’s story, which could just as easily have been set anywhere, shutting out the room. Dressing Room’s final moments arriving like hurried, unconvincing afterthoughts, attempting to connect room and story. But only words had the power to move, the dressing room supplying little more than washed out colour.

Dressing Room, written and directed by Enda Walsh. design by Paul Fahy, featuring the voice of John Olohan, presented by  Galway International Arts Festival runs at Bank of Ireland Theatre, University of Galway as part of Galway International Arts Festival 2026 until July 26.

For more information visit Galway International Arts Festival