Crooked House is an Irish company that:

• develops new work for theatre in the absurdist tradition of Beckett and Ionesco
• aims to interrogate classical texts in new and innovative performances
• premieres new work by leading international playwrights.

The company is an ensemble of eight theatre makers, with a dependent youth theatre company, a children's theatre workshop, and a number of strategic community-based theatre projects.

Crooked House offers training in a range of community theatre contexts and also receives regular training in performance craft.

The company has been to the forefront of pioneering controversial, cutting edge theatre in Ireland since the nineties - we premiered work by Mark Ravenhill (Handbag, Totally Over You), John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation), Anthony Neilson (The Censor), Jan Fosse (Purple) and Edward Bond (The Crime of the Twenty-First Century). In addition we interrogated classical texts and presented them in energetic ways (Antigone, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Nights' Dream, and Macbeth).

In recent times we have moved to develop our own material, exploring a series of work we call anti-sentimental. This work is influenced by the European absurdist comic tradition. It is also an attempt to explore theatre that does not rely on making only emotional or intellectual engagements with audience, and focuses as much on engaging imaginatively. It is anti-sentimental in the sense that it depends not alone on sentiment or feeling for meaning.

The style also asks the audience to create, to work hard at arriving at meaning. We reject the kind of theatre that encourages the audience to passively consume, to accept uncritically what occurs in front of them. The plays in this anti-sentimental cycle are between 45 minutes and 90 minutes long and have been created with the specific intention of engaging with the audience’s imagination as much as with their heart and with their head.

So far we have found absurdist drama to be an excellent vehicle for this exploration, and so, many of the pieces are influenced by Beckett, Ionesco and Camus.

Unsolicited Scripts

Crooked House does not look for unsolicited scripts simply because we do not have the time or resources to read them. This is a great pity as there are few enough avenues for emerging new playwrights – we know this. We work mostly on a voluntary basis, occupied fully with the current business of running the company with very few resources and little funding. In addition, we already develop our own work for the stage (partly because we do not have to ‘pay’ ourselves for doing this!) and we are not yet in a position to pay new writers.

However, you could still send us your work in the off chance that it may be read. We cannot guarantee that it will be and we cannot return manuscripts. Nor do we have the time to engage in correspondence regarding rejected scripts.

We do hope that this situation will change and that, someday, we will have someone who can read and assess the material that is currently being sent to us on a weekly basis.

"Nick Devlin, Eileen Fagan, Stuart Mc Glynn and Frank Conlon in Voices in the Rubble"

Steve Gunn and Nick Devlin in "Waiting for Johno" by Darren Donohue, Crypt Arts Centre, 2003