Our Community
Community Director
Paul O'Mahony
Paul O’Mahony is the Community Director at The Playground Theatre and has run community programs and workshops for more than 20 years. Most recently he has been collaborating with the University of Illinois to stage large-scale community readings of Greek tragedies in Urbana-Champaign, addressing societal issues relating to gun violence and systemic racism.
He is the artistic director of Out of Chaos for whom he has devised, written and performed Out of Chaos, Unmythable, Norsesome, Is Now A Good Time? and There’s Something Going On Here. Out of Chaos’s productions have won awards at major festivals in England, Germany, Scotland and Spain. Their production of Macbeth recently toured to large scale venues across the UK to great critical acclaim (see below) and will be touring nationally and internationally in 2026.
Other acting credits include several seasons at The Orange Tree Theatre; Othello (RSC); The Taming of the Shrew (Plymouth Theatre Royal); Suppliants (Battersea Arts Centre); Ice (English Touring Opera); Next Door (Out of Balanz, Denmark). Paul translated and adapted The House of Atreus (Barbican) and is currently developing a new musical based on the origins of the ancient Olympics. In response to the first lockdowns of 2020 he created Reading Greek Tragedy Online, a weekly series which live streamed every extant Greek tragedy (and several more poems and plays) with more than 120 actors and 50 academics from around the world. The series has garnered more than 300,000 views online and is now embedded in multiple syllabuses in US universities. There was significant accompanying outreach with over 1000 students creating their own performances inspired by Greek tragedy through the Playing Medea, Playing Antigone and Playing Dionysus competitions. Paul was an Associate of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies from 2020 to 2023. He will be directing Nick Pierpan’s The Problem with the Seventh Year at the White Bear in November, and The Tempest for Vache Baroque in 2026. He is the Course Director (and creator) of the British American Drama Academy’s Greek Theatre Program, a unique summer course which combines theory and practice with leading academics and theatre practitioners in the UK and Greece.
