BAN and Absent The Wrong

Two raw and revealing plays about family, Ireland, secrecy and shame, by the award-winning playwright Carys D. Coburn. Set in 1980s Ireland, BAN is a reworking of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba. Five sisters, bound together under their mother's watchful eye, spend their lives longing for escape, power and the one local eligible bachelor. Dark, raucous and with a tender heart, BAN was nominated for the prestigious Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 2025. In Absent The Wrong, a woman looking for her child is lied to; an artist pitches a memorial that is never built; a landlord raises rents; and thousands of children disappear. An intimate and sweeping play about seventy years of adoptees and their search for answers, it premiered at the Abbey Theatre as part of the 2022 Dublin Theatre Festival, where it was named Best New Production.