Boucicault's Colleen Bawn set to enthrall festive audiences once more

NOTHING beats a bit of Boucicault at Christmas.

In recent years the Abbey has produced a couple of very popular Dion Boucicault revivals and this time around it’s the peerless Druid Theatre Company who are serving up a Christmas treat, staging the most famous of the Anglo-Irish writer’s melodramas, The Colleen Bawn. The show has just got underway in Galway’s Black Box Theatre and it will tour to venues nationwide in the new year.

When first staged in 1860 The Colleen Bawn took New York and London audiences by storm. In the Adelphi in London it ran for 330 nights consecutively, a feat previously unheard of. Queen Victoria was said to have attended it three times in a week. Its huge success only confirmed the Dublin-born dramatist’s status as one of the greatest theatre-makers of the Victorian age.