About Us

Oh!Scare Wilde Productions was founded in 2017 by four students of UCC's Drama & Theatre Studies course.

The company was created as a vehicle for their final year production, Canterville in Spiritu Sancto - a postmodern adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost that explored the failure of the very company performing it.

Following this, the company became a professional endeavor, and Canterville went on to be performed in the 2017 Galway Fringe Festival, and was revived in Cork's An Spailpín Fánach in 2019.

The company's next play was Issues: An Important Play, a loosely-connected sketch comedy that satirized self-serious issue-based theatre. It was shown as a work-in-progress piece in Dublin's Scene + Heard Festival in 2019, before debuting as a full play in the following year's festival in 2020.

Following a period of pandemic-imposed hiatus, the company's next play, The Relatability Engine, debuted at the Scene + Heard Festival  in 2022. The play was an absurdist dark comedy that explored themes of isolation and identity.

Oh!Scare Wilde's ambitious next project came in the form of The Pigeon Factory, which debuted at the Cork Midsummer Festival in 2023.  The play is a one-man absurdist comedy that explores themes of isolation, work, family, and the philosophy of capitalism. 

The Pigeon Factory went on to be revived in the Cork Arts Theatre in 2024, and then toured to Dublin's Smock Alley Theatre and the West Cork Fit-Up Festival later that year.

In a four-star review, The Irish Times described the show as "ingenious" and "consistently entertaining". 

In 2025, the company debuted its most ambitious show to date - Bottlenose: A Mystery for Modern Ireland at the Cork Midsummer Festival. A noir murder-mystery about Fungie the Dolphin, the show had a sold-out run in the Granary Theatre. A review by Tripe + Drisheen called writer Aaron O'Neill "easily the best comic writer at work in theatre in Cork".

Oh!Scare Wilde Productions was founded in 1887 by Oscar Wilde's corpse from the future. Appearing in a vision to the younger, alive Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde's corpse intoned that he would one day be the namesake of a small Irish theatre company. The younger Wilde, intrigued by this fascinating event in his future, attempted to die as soon as possible, so as to become the corpse that would eventually appear to him with this news. 

He quickly began eating vegetables and abstaining from cocaine in total defiance of Victorian ideas of healthy living. His efforts were in vain however, and he would have to wait out the rest of his life naturally and die before 50 like everyone did in those days. 

Upon becoming a corpse, the younger Oscar Wilde - now the younger corpse Oscar Wilde - stewed in his grave for over 100 years, dreaming of the day when a small group of drama graduates would give their company a stupid name. Finally, in 2017, that dream became a reality, and Oh!Scare Wilde Productions debuted their first production - an adaptation of Wilde's own short story, The Canterville Ghost. 

Wafting his ephemeral spirit through the ventilation ducts of the Granary Theatre, Oscar Wilde's older younger corpse gazed in astonishment at the play being performed before him. It was the worst thing he had ever seen - full of smug, obscure meta humour about theatre that only a group of 20-something drama students could possibly have convinced themselves was worth the price of admission.

Blowing steam out of his corpse ears and fuming with the whine of a cartoon kettle, Oscar Wilde's corpse wrote a scathing review of the play in the Underworld Evening Standard, chiding the cultural references that he could not possibly understand as a dead person of his age. The review was full of the wry wit befitting a man of Oscar Wilde's intellect, though it was written exclusively in unintelligible groans scrawled in blood, befitting a man of his deadness.

Understanding now that his older corpse self was trying to warn him, Oscar Wilde's corpse traveled back in time to confront his past alive self. However, his brain having decomposed over a century ago, he could not remember what he was supposed to say, and instead just played his own skeletal head like a bongo. The younger Wilde, much amused by this, danced a merry jig - and thus the future of Oh!Scare Wilde Productions was secure.