The House Keeper

Busy times for Rough Magic, what with Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite at the Gaiety in February, Arthur Riordan’s Improbable Frequency at the same venue in March, and now the world premiere of The House Keeper, a new play by Morna Regan which previews at Project from 19 April and opens on Tue 24. Light-hearted comedy is put on the back burner in this psychological thriller, a darkly humorous drama exploring the nature of possession, entitlement and inheritance. Directed by Lynne Parker and featuring Cathy Belton, Ingrid Craigie and Robert O’Mahoney, it follows the plight of a desperate young woman who, threatened with homelessness, breaks into the house of a wealthy woman, but before long realises that she has disturbed a hornet’s nest of unimagined proportions. Runs til 12 May. www.roughmagic.ie www.projectartscentre.ie

reJOYCED!

Donal O’Kelly’s JOYCED! is back in town, playing at Bewleys (lunchtime) until Sat 28 April, in conjunction with One City One Book which this year is James Joyce’s Dubliners. A one-woman tour de force performed by Katie O’Kelly, this whirlwind journey through 1904 Joycean Dublin – later immortalised in Ulysses – depicts some of the most important people in Joyce’s life, his father John Stanislaus Joyce and his cronies, Oliver St. John Gogarty, the tenor John McCormack, Alfred Hunter (the man who would later become Bloom) and of course the one and only Nora Barnacle. www.bewleyscafetheatre.com

Turn Around @ Project

ABSOLUT Fringe and Project Arts Centre are teaming up for Turn Around, a season of previous Fringe favourites performed in repertory over a 3 week stretch with a diverse line up of theatre, dance, puppetry, spoken word and music-theatre dating from 2009-2011. So you get a second chance to see Ger Clancy’s Waterworn, puppets, projections and live music in a captivating story inspired by Hemmingway and Moby Dick; The Spinner, a delicate yet ruthless dance piece performed by DISH, an exciting group of emerging international dance artists; Threshold, originally When Irish Hearts are Praying a darkly comic, intense and gritty play in a newly revised production; Three Men Talking About Things They Kinda Know About by performance poets Colm Keegan, Kalle Ryan and Stephen James Smith, talking life, love and feelings – different histories, same shit; and Brian Fleming’s Gis a Shot of Your Bongos Mister, the world through a drummer's ears from inner city Dublin to the suburbs of Senegal. Runs at Project from 12- 28 April, and you can buy all 5 shows for just 50 quid, which seems like a bargain. www.projectartscentre.ie

Pan Pan: A Doll House

Pan Pan follow the huge success of The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane and Beckett’s All That Fall with A Doll House, a new take on the Henrik Ibsen classic, and given that it’s Pan Pan you can expect the unexpected. Director Gavin Quinn says: ‘Pan Pan's new version of Ibsen's A Doll House, (the world's first great prose drama which at the time exploded like a bomb into contemporary life) will be the opening show of the ‘new’ Smock Alley Theatre. Smock Alley was originally a theatre in the 17th century and hosted the Irish Premiere of Hamlet. This version of A Doll House will examine the like- and unlike-ability of these famous Ibsen characters and how they can still connect to today's supposedly restless age.’ Design is by Aedín Cosgrove, costumes by Bruno Schwengl and the fine cast includes Áine Ní Mhuirí, Charlie Bonner, Daniel Reardon, Dermot Magennis, Judith Roddy and Pauline Hutton. Previews until Mon 9 and runs from 10 -28 April. www.panpantheatre.com