DUBLIN THEATRE FESTIVAL 2026: Review: HEROES OF TOMORROW, Project Arts Centre

Created by Brokentalkers (Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan) in collaboration with Andy Smith, Heroes of Tomorrow resists standard theatrical classification. Presented at Project Arts Centre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, this world premiere plays less like a scripted drama and more like a live, activist-led gallery installation or a guided museum tour in motion.

The central narrative thread follows Jan Hansen, a fictional Norwegian conceptual artist invited to create a major new work through a commission funded by a big tech consortium. Around this frame, performers Malua Ní Chléirigh, Alice Roots, and Michael Tient operate as a collective of researchers and guides. They move through a dense collage of historical and contemporary vignettes, covering everything from Viking conquests and resource extraction to corporate monopolies, protest movements, and state surveillance.

The production transformed the Space Upstairs into a sterile, museum-adjacent gallery environment. Ronán Duffy’s set design and Dara Hoban’s lighting support this atmosphere of institutional privilege, establishing an art-world container where high-minded cultural prestige sits alongside corporate backing.

Rather than adopting traditional character arcs, the ensemble delivers material with a controlled, deadpan register. Their presentation shifts between historical recitation, satire, and heightened declaration. The piece repeatedly returns to Bertolt Brecht’s famous assertion that art should not be a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. Yet, for all its rhetoric about resistance, the show functions more like a safe echo-chamber lecture than a genuine call to action, relying on convenient, selective narratives that avoid true nuance or friction.

Pacing remains the production's primary hurdle. The 90-minute run opens with a painfully slow, museum-tour cadence that delivers heavily contextualised commentary with little structural variation, making early stretches feel flat. As the piece progresses, the density escalates sharply into a rapid, overwhelming barrage of dates, references, and names. While this final disorientation appears intentional, mirroring the chaos of modern information overload, the sheer volume of material often buries its central thesis beneath the noise.

Heroes of Tomorrow aims to be an urgent act of protest, yet it frequently lands as a comfortable lecture for a like-minded audience, prioritizing political noise over sustained dramatic friction ultimately which proves more overwhelming than illuminating.

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