Course details

The week’s work will involve an in-depth investigation of skills and techniques involved in creating productions that are fresh, vivid, and rigorously achieved. Using a broad range of texts, we will explore, among other things, the conceptualisation of productions, the use of improvisation in the rehearsal process, close textual analysis, the physicalisation of performance, and approaches to different genre styles.

The workshops are open to both actors and directors, and all participants will be actively involved in the exploratory process.

About the tutor

Conall Morrison is a theatre director and playwright. He has directed thirty plays for the Abbey Theatre and has directed for the
Lyric Theatre, Belfast, the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Co., the Globe Theatre, English National Opera, Cameron Mackintosh Productions, and for many leading independent companies. He has twice won the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Director, and twice won Best Production.

Some of his productions include Macbeth, Hamlet, Tarry Flynn, The Crucible, Borstal Boy, Beckett’s The Old Tune and End of Days, Friel’s Translations, Dancing at Lughnasa, Freedom of the City, Tom Murphy’s Whistle in The Dark, The House, and Conversations on a Homecoming, and premieres of work by Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, Frank McGuinness, Gary Mitchell, Colin Murphy.

As well as several original plays, he has done numerous adaptations, either of extant plays or drawn from other source material. His work as writer-director includes Tarry Flynn, Abbey Theatre and Royal National Theatre; his own adaptations of Antigone and The Bacchae; The Travels of Jonathan Swift, inspired by Swift’s works, for Blue Raincoats TC – Best Ensemble, Irish Times Theatre Awards 2020; Woyzeck in Winter, his fusion of Buchner’s Woyzeck and Schubert’s Winterreise, for Landmark TC/Barbican Theatre, London.

Recent work includes Joyce’s Women by Edna O’Brien for the Abbey, DTF ’22, Strauss’s Elektra for INO, The Treaty by Colin Murphy for Fishamble, and Backwards up a Rainbow, by Rosaleen Linehan, for Landmark.