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We are delighted for the return of Tinderbox Theatre Company’s Incubate Festival, presented in association with us here at the MAC, on 18 April.
Returning for its third year following the huge success of the previous festivals, Incubate Festival 2026 is a dynamic one day showcase of bold new theatre in development. Each Incubate artist presents a 30 minute extract of an original work in progress. The work is raw, ambitious and ready to be tested in front of a live audience.
Developed through our Engine artist development programme, the festival supports the next generation of theatre makers to experiment, challenge themselves and create exciting new work.
Alongside the performances, the festival will also host a free symposium led by Tinderbox Artistic Director Patrick J O’Reilly, exploring the process of making new work and nurturing developing artists. The Incubate Festival is perfect for artists, students, programmers, theatre lovers and anyone curious about how new work is made and tested in front of an audience.
Experience works-in-progress from Northern Ireland’s most exciting theatre makers:
Blind Man is alone and in the middle of the ocean. Why are they there? How? We journey on Blind Man’s Boat, but is it memory, imagination or delusion?
Two polar opposite transgender men studying music are forced to write a song together. A new rock musical about performative males, queer desire, and what it means to be seen.
Exploring the largely untold friendship between Irish-writer Oscar Wilde and French-painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar + Henri investigates the line between history and memory, and who has the right to tell it.
Woven through monologue and movement, a woman draws on the farcical rituals hidden within rural Ireland’s domestic life. In a search for what is sacred she awakens what has been suppressed.
Anna has a comfortable life until she turns 55, 2 Sons have come out between weeks of each other, the menopause has hit badly and don’t get her started on that man…….what a prick!! Anna and the Prick takes a look into internalised Patriarchy in women and misogyny in the medical profession.
Unexpected is a one-woman play exploring motherhood, memory, and inheritance, using live performance and personal archive to examine how becoming a mother forces a reckoning with childhood, expectation, and care.
The symposium offers audiences the opportunity to meet the Incubate artists, hear directly about their creative processes, and take part in an open conversation about developing new theatre.
It is a chance to go behind the scenes, ask questions and connect with the next generation of theatre makers. Led by Tinderbox Artistic Director Patrick J O’Reilly we'll be exploring the process of making new work and nurturing developing artists.
A giggle at a funeral. Gen Z absurdity meets ancient tragedy as Pan predicts the end of everything. A twisted, tragicomic, multimedia reboot of the Greek God's death.
Ambitious journalist, Cara, discovers that her Harry styles teenage fan-fiction has gone viral and she now must write an article about it! Nostalgic and empowering, Harry Styles wants you to come.
When her husband is tasked with staging satanic ritual sites, Linda becomes convinced that she’s living with the devil. Satanic Panic explores the impact of psychological warfare on ordinary people.
As society collapses, faith curdles and the earth becomes barren; a faded show queen grapples with their place in the end and prepares for their final curtain call.
This discount will apply automatically when adding one ticket for each Incubate events below:
Bookings must be made in one transaction to qualify for the discount.
