It’s a new musical satire about greed, dereliction and “the battle for Dublin’s soul” told through surreal humour and Europop bangers: Pretty Vacant, which will be performed later this month as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, intends to be as fun a 75 minutes as a piece of theatre about the Irish housing crisis possibly can be.
Written by Tom Swift and directed by Jo Mangan, aka the husband-and-wife team behind the production company Performance Corporation, the show, their first “proper” musical, is their preferred way to tackle the subject of hollowed-out cities and communities.
“It’s a big, heavy issue. So how do you approach a big, heavy issue? With the pen of a playwright who is embedded in the satirical world. There’s no point approaching it nose on, because no one wants didacticism. I’m certainly not interested in being preached at by the theatre I go to,” Mangan says.
Staged at Tailors’ Hall in the Liberties, Pretty Vacant centres on Carmilla, a failed former Eurovision entrant played by Ruth McGill, who is trying to sell her vision for the area on behalf of shark-like property developers. At a public consultation meeting, however, she is appalled to discover that the local community won’t simply go along with her plan to “set the Liberties free”.
“Carmilla’s Eurovision background just gives us licence for her to sing, and for others to break into song. Musicals are a funny thing, anyway, aren’t they?” Swift says.
“They’re totally wild. They make no sense,” Mangan says. “‘And now I’m going to sing a song!’”
Although the duo, working with the composer Ellen Cranitch, previously gave the operatic treatment to James Joyce’s The Dead, this is the first “straight-up musical” they have done.
Mangan sings a snippet of Carmilla’s Eurovision flop. “Re-re-re-re-Regeneration. Where does Regeneration go after that?”
“I don’t think Laura needs to know,” Swift says.
“She doesn’t need to hear our bad singing,” she agrees.
The Eurovision framing means Swift and Pretty Vacant’s composer and sound designer, Daragh Dukes, “can go anywhere musically”, so alongside dance numbers such as Regeneration and Living Apart (In an Apart Hotel), there’s a punk one called Vicious Circle, while Emmet Kirwan, playing a local socialist TD who’s really from Harold’s Cross, does a rap.
“We have a song called F**k You and the Horse You Rode in On. I don’t know if The Irish Times is allowed to publish that,” Swift says.
The production – which also features Alan Howley, Aisling O’Mara, Matthew Malone and Camille Lucy Ross – includes video work by Richie Power, the creator of the online project Chats in the Flats, as well as interviews with local people by Swift and Dukes.
“We go crazy and sing and dance, and there’s a whole big Eurotrash element to the piece, but then we hear the real voices of the neighbourhood, and it brings us to a real place,” Mangan says. “We want our audiences to have fun, but then ground them in the reality of the situation a little bit as well.”
Performance Corporation, now in its 24th year, is known for site-specific theatre. “The place always speaks to the work. Sometimes for us it starts the work, so we’re, like, ‘Okay, this is an amazing place, let’s do a piece of work in it,’” Mangan says.
Pretty Vacant wasn’t always going to be set and staged in the Liberties, however.
“The initial idea was all around the dereliction and vacant buildings that we see all over Dublin and all over so many towns around Ireland,” Swift says. “The question was: why? We’re in a housing crisis. Why aren’t these buildings being used? Why are they being knocked down for facilities for tourists, rather than facilities or housing for local communities?”
The fight to save Dublin’s Liberties: ‘It’s sadly dying, fading away’
Having booked a room in the Digital Hub in the Liberties for a couple of days to develop the project, they started to look around the area. “We realised it’s a microcosm of all of those issues,” he says. So they “dug deeper”, and a walking tour with Anthony Freeman O’Brien, a local artist and activist who performs in Pretty Vacant, convinced them this was the right place. The search for venues began.
“We looked at a lot of large spaces that were in the churchy vein. We looked St Werburgh’s Church, we looked at St Catherine’s Church, but when we came across Tailors’ Hall we felt this was for us. It’s smaller, it’s more intimate,” Mangan says.
The piece is staged in traverse, with the audience sitting either side of the performance area and the walls used for decor and video projection.
Tailors’ Hall, situated on Back Lane, was built in 1706. It’s rich with history. Over the centuries it has been used by schools, charities and Freemasons, and in 1792 it was the meeting place of the Catholic Committee during its campaign against the penal laws, becoming known as the Back Lane Parliament. “It all seemed to tie in thematically to what we’re trying to talk about,” Swift says.
It is now run by An Taisce, the conservation charity, which will participate in a postshow discussion after a free (but ticketed) performance of Pretty Vacant on Culture Night, on September 18th. The event is also part of Home Ground, a Dublin Fringe Festival initiative aimed at the communities represented in fringe shows.
“People sometimes say people don’t come to things if they’re free. On the contrary, I think price point is a barrier for a lot of people in terms of engagement with the arts, so I’m always very keen on ensuring that we create access points to our work,” Mangan says.
Performance Corporation has won numerous awards. It first show, an adaptation of Voltaire’s Candide, won best production at the fringe in 2002.
“We’re really happy to be coming back to the fringe and connecting with, let’s be frank, another generation. We wanted to make this show for the fringe because we feel that the topics that we’re hitting are important for a younger audience,” she says. “It’s just remarkable the great swathe of dereliction and housing issues that everyone is dealing with.”
It’s a busy time for Performance Corporation. We chat, barefoot, in one of the studios in Dance House, off Talbot Street in Dublin, in late July during a lunchtime break from rehearsals for their August production, Tír an Traonaigh, an Irish-language play that brought its audience on a bus through the Mullet Peninsula, in Co Mayo.
Tír an Traonaigh review: As the sun breaks through the clouds, there are tears in the audience
“A rest” is lined up once Pretty Vacant concludes, though they’re also working on a large-scale version of Gulliver’s Travels. “Jonathan Swift is a distant relative of Tom’s, so we’re hustling something into existence on that,” Mangan says.
“I have an aunt who has done the research. We are talking a distant cousin many times removed,” Swift says. Still, it’s possible a penchant and aptitude for satire survived the generations. “I’d like to think that somehow there’s some small bit of a gene in there.”
These aren’t easy times for satirists. “After we would do a reading of a section Tom had written, Anthony would go, ‘That happened.’ Like, bizarre stuff. Tom would come up with something to be satirical, but it’s almost impossible to satirise what’s going on,” Mangan says.
“We’re definitely living in a world where satire is struggling to keep up with reality. It’s hard. Trump just makes everything redundant and ridiculous,” Swift says.
We talk about how communities can fight back against the forces of gentrification. “It’s very difficult. It feels like they’re up against a juggernaut, which is money writ large,” he says. “Corporate interests seem to be just ruling our world now.
“I don’t have the solutions, unfortunately. I suppose our role is to just point out the failures, and the dark humour in it all, the ridiculousness of it all. The solutions, hopefully, might come from people who go and see it.”
For Mangan there is something powerful in the sense of community identity in the Liberties. “There’s a lot of meitheal involved. There’s a lot of people working together to make things happen. It’s like a village in the middle of the city.
“To me it’s like places where my father is from, in Co Mayo, or my mother, in Co Galway, where everyone knows each other and everyone helps each other out.
“One can only hope that that sort of clinging on to neighbourliness, and minding each other and looking out for each other, will help the community survive.”
But will the old musical-theatre rule about leaving the audience in a better mood than when they arrived apply here?
“I don’t know how the audience will feel when they leave,” Swift says, laughing. “Hopefully they’ll be humming a lot of the tunes.”
Pretty Vacant is at Tailors’ Hall, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, from Tuesday, September 15th, until Sunday, September 20th. The festival begins on Saturday, September 5th
Dublin Fringe Festival 2026: Six more to see
The festival’s 2026 edition features 70 shows. Here are just half a dozen that have caught our eye.
Kafka’s DollPeacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Friday, September 4th, until Saturday, September 12th
Aimed at audiences of all ages, this Theatre Lovett production tells the story of how Franz Kafka rediscovered a fragile faith in the human spirit after consoling a girl who loses her doll. What follows is “an extraordinary act of imagination” told through letters detailing the doll’s odyssey.
Soak: The Perfect ManCube, Project Arts Centre, Cube, Friday, September 4th, until Saturday, September 12th
Samuel Yakura’s new contemporary music-theatre, Soak, is billed as part concert, part confession, part reckoning. The show explores themes of masculinity, grief and inherited silence, inviting audiences on a journey of vulnerability, connection and healing.
ThérèseProject Arts Centre – Cube, Saturday, September 5th, until Saturday, September 12th
Set in a children’s playground in Dublin, Thérèse follows a woman in the throes of grief for her brother, which opens up a portal to old wounds and past injustices. It’s a “theatrical homage to those who have been lost” that seeks accountability from those in power.
Dead in HereDublin Municipal Theatre at Smock Alley – Black Box, September 9th-12th
Inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Dead in Here explores how it feels to be a young person who is hyperaware of the world’s problems but feels powerless to solve them. It’s a play about “love and death that interrogates our collective desire to escape reality”.
Trolley BoyCivic Theatre, Tallaght, Tuesday, September 15th, until Thursday, September 17th
Bob is lost in an endless shop in this “journey through the aisles of existence”. It’s a surreal dance-theatre piece, choreographed by Diarmuid Armstrong Mayock, in which the inhabitants of the supermarket “move through a strange existence they do not understand”.
SaoirsePeacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Wednesday, September 16th, until Saturday, September 19th
This new Irish-language musical (or ceoldráma) by Shauna Carrick was first performed at Galway International Arts Festival in July. It’s a summer Gaeltacht-set story of first love, freedom and the modh coinníollach. English-language access is available through the Sibwrd app.
Fringefest.com has details of all this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival productions