Rooms

★★★★ The Guardian ★★★★ Financial Times ★★★★ Broadway World UK ★★★★ The Stage ★★★★ Londonist

Ushered into a series of five realistic spaces, housing clues to the character once confined within their walls, you’ll hear haunting accounts of solitude as part of an immersive theatre installation.

As one of an audience of six, step inside the meticulously detailed rooms, exploring each for two minutes before the recorded audio begins.

Absorbing texts by Enda Walsh draw us into the highly intimate lives of these individuals, with narration by Niall Buggy, Charlie Murphy, Donal O’Kelly, Paul Reid and Eileen Walsh.

Each individual room is contained within a 5M x 5M white cube. An audience of five people is invited to step inside to explore these spaces for two minutes before the recorded audio begins and each story is told. Each lasts 15 minutes and are presented as installations in a site-specific gallery setting. The seven poetic short stories - Room 303, A Girl’s Bedroom, Kitchen, Bathroom, Office 33A, Waiting Room and Changing Room - premiered at Galway International Arts Festival between 2014 and 2020.

The first three installations were presented together under the collective title of Rooms at the Festival in July 2016. Festival audiences were blown away, calling it “intimate”, “very effective”, and a “really interesting sensory experience”. A Girl’s Bedroom also toured to the Kennedy Center, Washington DC in 2016. In May of 2017, Rooms was installed at the Irish Arts Centre in New York City where the series drew rave reviews from The New York Times, Vogue, and The New Yorker.

In April 2019, the five Rooms installations to date were presented together for the first time at the Barbican Centre in London. There, it was hailed by The Guardian, The Financial Times, Broadway World, and more.

Since then, Waiting Room premiered at the July 2019 Galway International Arts Festival and Changing Room premiered at Galway International Arts Festival's Autumn Edition in September 2020.

Rooms are designed by the Festival’s Artistic Director Paul Fahy, who has collaborated with Walsh on these works over the past three years.

Enda Walsh is a multi-award-winning Irish playwright and one of the foremost writers of his generation.