Spoken Word Highlights at Dublin Fringe Festival 2025

Dublin Fringe Festival 2025 brings a wide array of spoken word performances that merge theatre, comedy, poetry, and storytelling. This year’s programme showcases artists who push the boundaries of live performance, from explorations of identity and heritage to biting satire. Spoken word has long been part of the festival’s character, moving over the past decade from open mic stages and late night cabaret slots into the heart of the programme. The 2025 line up reflects the variety and ambition of artists working with words today, with shows that combine sharp satire and poetic autobiography, weaving language with theatre, music, and movement. Together they demonstrate how spoken word continues to evolve as a form that is both intimate and expansive.

I Want To Speak To Your Manager (How I Was Radicalised And Became...Karen

Internationally acclaimed slam poet, Hughes presents her first one woman show following a sold out Scene+Heard performance. The piece transforms the figure of the so called “Karen” into a lens for examining entitlement, accountability, and social justice. With humour, frustration, and a strong current of female rage, Hughes charts her tongue in cheek “radicalisation” through complaint emails and customer service disputes. What emerges is a sharp satire of privilege that also questions whether demanding better treatment is really such a terrible thing. The result promises laughter edged with righteous anger.

Venue: The Pearse Centre | Duration: 45 mins
Performances: 5–14 Sept | Prices: €12–16

Roots in Every Room

Anna D’s Roots in Every Room, presented by SoFFt Productions, blends spoken word, film, and sound to tell a deeply personal story of healing and ancestral reckoning. The multisensory performance explores womanhood, trauma, and inherited memory., moving between private dreams and shared history. Supported by The Complex, Dublin and Poetry Ireland, the piece exemplifies how spoken word can expand through multimedia collaboration, transforming inherited pain into radical hope and strength.

Venue: The Complex Gallery | Duration: 60 mins
Performances: 6–8 Sept | Prices: €12–16

Stephen Jobs

Comedian Stephen Colfer takes a different approach in Stephen Jobs, a stand up show reflecting on two decades of unconventional work that supported his comedy career. From alphabetising CDs to surviving faulty tech demonstrations and unusual encounters, Colfer mines the absurdities of modern labour with sharp wit. His premise is deceptively simple: not just asking what we do for a living, but why. The result is part memoir, part cultural critique, and part tribute to the resilience of artists balancing multiple roles.

Venue: Smock Alley Theatre Boys' School | Duration: 60 mins
Performances: 6–14 Sept | Prices: €12–16

Octopus Children

Few artists embody the vitality of Irish spoken word as vividly as FELISPEAKS. Their new work Octopus Children, presented by THISISPOPBABY and directed by Oonagh Murphy, is a coming of age story set between Longford and Nigeria. Blending poetry, choreography, music, and striking visual design, the piece follows Young Felicia, a queer Black Irish midlands culchie, as they navigate identity with the help of a wise guide: The Octopus. Part gig theatre, part poetic landscape, it invites audiences into an unapologetic celebration of queerness, Black Irish identity, and belonging. This premiere continues FELISPEAKS’ reputation for bridging genres with originality and power.

Venue: Project Arts Centre Space Upstairs | Duration: 80 mins
Performances: 5–14 Sept | Prices: €16–20

Hungry Grass/Stray Sod

Wandering Stories Theatre brings Hungry Grass/Stray Sod to Dublin following its award winning off Broadway debut at Origin’s 1st Irish Festival. The show intertwines folklore, migration, and personal history through the stories of an Irish bisexual woman and a Ugandan lesbian who meet abroad. Their conversations uncover parallels across cultures and histories, demonstrating how myth and memory can connect lives. With its mix of spoken word and storytelling, the piece highlights how folklore can be both cautionary tale and cultural inheritance. The production also forms part of the festival’s “Pay What You Can” initiative, broadening access for audiences.

Venue: National Leprechaun Museum | Duration: 50 mins
Performances: 8–17 Sept | Prices: €16–18 (Pay What You Can on 17 Sept)

Seanchoíche: In Their Shoes:

A Seanchoíche event, In Their Shoes: Live, is a podcast turned stage event hosted by Gaff and Becks. Guests write personal stories on a shared theme, then swap and read each other’s aloud, stepping directly into another’s experience. The result is often moving, often funny, and always intimate, creating moments of vulnerability and connection. First recorded at Spotify Studios in London, the project arrives in Dublin as both live performance and communal experiment in empathy.

Venue: Smock Alley Theatre | Duration: 90 mins
Performance: 18 Sept | Prices: €16–18

Together, these productions illustrate the breadth of spoken word today. Some mine humour from the absurdities of everyday life, others draw on ancestry and heritage, while others create shared spaces for dialogue and empathy. What unites them is the use of language as something more than storytelling, a tool for performance, protest, healing, and connection.

These are just some of the events scheduled in the 2025 Dublin Fringe Festival. To view the full programme click here.

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