AbbeyTheatre

The Cave - Introduction Notes by AbbeyTheatre

Youth's the Season -? Audio Described Introduction by AbbeyTheatre

Youth's the Season -?: Programme Note from Director Sarah Jane Scaife by AbbeyTheatre

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.”

Emma - Audio Described Programme Notes by AbbeyTheatre