Kilkenny Arts Festival – Programme Details 

The details of the Kilkenny Arts Festival have just been released! As ever, there’s a heavy emphasis on classical music, but there really is something for everyone. You can find the full programme here. We’ve decided to have a look at some of the more interesting-sounding events.

Top 5 Picks

What Are You Afraid Of? – By Peter Hanly – 5-9, 11-12 August – Have you ever wondered how actors get up in front of an audience? Peter Hanly discusses stage fright and the fear of going blank.

Anna B Savage – 14 August 2025, 9pm – Cleere’s Theatre – Anyone who saw Anna in the Unitarian Church, Dublin, recently will know what to expect! She’s an amazing live performer, intense and raw.

Custom of the Coast – Kamala Sankaram & Paul Muldoon – The blurb describes it as Opera, but also “a blend of traditional Irish and Indian Classical Music”! Make of it what you will. The story tells of the “tragic life story of Savita Halappanavar and that of the Cork-born pirate Anne Bonny”.

Neon Dusk – 7-10, 13-17 Aug  – In this one, we’re promised an “explosive acrobatic spectacle “.

Kathy Prendergast & Chris Leach, Cities of the World – The world of visual art, with the Butler Gallery’s latest exhibition, which runs from 9 August — 26 October 2025.

Highlights include:

Premiere performance of Custom of the Coast – a dramatic new work framing the stories of two women who changed Ireland – Savita Halappanavar and Anne Bonny – from US/Indian composer Kamala Sankaram and text from poet Paul Muldoon. Directed by Alan Gilsenan and Music Direction by Kate Ellis; featuring Anchal Dhir, Michelle O’Rourke, Crash Ensemble and Danny O’Mahony – presented with Yellow Asylum Film. Fri 8 Aug, St. Canice’s Cathedral.

Premiere of Peter Hanly’s What Are you Afraid Of? with the Festival’s most frequent theatre partners of recent years, Rough Magic. Directed by the award-winning Lynne Parker and featuring Hanly himself playing the main role in this extraordinary work of self-interrogation. This production simultaneously takes us into Hanly’s inner thoughts while  inviting us all to consider the same primary question of ourselves. Presented in partnership with Rough Magic. 5-12 Aug, Watergate Theatre.

Premiere of a new audio/visual projection spectacle from the genre-defying artist Laura Sheeran for Light Up the Castle 2025 –“ ____ Because You’re Free” for Kilkenny Castle – Sheeran’s work asks what it means to be human today, in a world gripped by technological advancement, in an ecological crisis, and invites us to remember ourselves as feeling, embodied beings. Commissioned by Kilkenny Arts Festival and presented in association with OPW. 13-16 Aug, Kilkenny Castle . FREE.

Premiere of Neon Dusk  – new work featuring an acrobatic blend of spectacle, movement and contemporary circus from Jonah McGreevy, Mafalda Conclaves and Daniel Seabra –  a spectacle powered by solar energy which offers a surreal and highly original take on human movement, bathed in the fractured light of our electric age. 7-10 Aug & 13-17 Aug, Castle Yard.

Premiere of Where We Bury the Bones from the powerhouse of Dumbworld, John McIlduff and Brian Irvine, with designer Sabine Dargent. Developed out of a work presented at KAF 2021, this new production begins with the discovery of a single bone during an excavation which explores the way in which we choose to tell can reveal more about ourselves than the history itself. 14-16 Aug, Watergate Theatre.

Premiere of We Who Live Under Heaven  – a mixed-reality work from Performance Corporation, directed by Jo Mangan with music by the iconic electronic composer Roger Doyle  – audiences will encounter an unknown being, in captivity, where connection transcends reality. Sun 17 Aug, Watergate Theatre.

Premiere of Sam Perkin’s The More Beautiful World, commissioned by Kilkenny Arts Festival is performed by The Fews Ensemble led by Joanne Quigley McParland and directed by Tom Creed- based on a text from Charles Eisenstein, this work asks what in a tie of social and ecological crisis, what can we do to make the world a better place.

Premiere of This-Topia from the awe-inspiring band, Meltybrains?  – Part immersive theatre, part rave, part ritual – a meltdown in motion directed by Kate O’Halloran  and choreography and performance by Jessie Thompson and visuals by Ross Ryder. Sun 17 Aug, Watergate Theatre.

Irish Premiere  of Secret Byrd featuring the Gesualdo Six and the viol consort Fretwork in an immersive piece of concert theatre with a performance of William Byrd’s glorious Mass for Five Voices, directed by Bill Barclay. 12 & 13 Aug, Black Abbey.

Irish Premiere of 740 Years of Reverb from composer Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) and performed by organists Eliza McCarthy and James McVinnie – titled uniquely for St. Canice’s Cathedral, this work is performed in a continuous 8-hours where audiences will experience an epic journey of sound. Sun 9 Aug, St. Canice’s Cathedral.

These works and performances sit at the heart of Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2025 where both the intimacy and expansiveness of human challenges are explored throughout the work of these extraordinary artists – that defy genre and categorisation but invite audiences to immerse themselves in a range of provocative and considered work.