The National Print Museum is one of Dublin’s most unknown and unsung museums. Located in Beggars Bush Barracks just south of Grand Canal Dock, it has been showcasing the development of printing in Ireland since it first opened in 1996. This year, as part of celebrations marking 120 years of the Abbey Theatre, the Museum has been exhibiting its collection of theatre posters from the 1970s to the 1980s. Curated by Dr Linda King, Poster Boys foregrounds the work of Kevin Scally, the theatre’s first in-house graphic designer, and Brendan Foreman, who succeeded Scally in late 1979. The exhibition tracks the evolution of these designers’ styles and approaches, and incorporates comments and reflections from Scally and Foreman themselves on their own work.
“There is a skill to creating a good poster for a play”, the writer Frank McGuinness claimed. “It shouldn’t say too little, and above all, it should not say too much.” Posters, for both these designers, are delicate and considered artistic creations—never mere gaudy commercial advertisements or clunky dull playbills. They act as a middle-man between the play and the would-be audience, standing as an independent interpretation of the play themselves. For Scally, achieving this end means figuring out what the play is about, and then working with the play’s director—and their own unique vision, to, as he says, “capture that interpretation in the poster”.
Starting with rough sketches on paper or simple gouache paintings, Scally developed and then scaled up his initial ideas into eye-catching, satisfying designs. His works are characterised by bold blocks of untextured colour with sharp, minimalist text. Scally’s style seems to find itself, at times, somewhere between art nouveau and pop art, with an affinity for deep colours and two-dimensional backgrounds. His posters are often imaginatively and creatively striking—in his poster for Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, he takes inspiration from the Parisian artist of the theatre, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, for his depictions of Tristan Tzara, Vladimir Lenin and James Joyce. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, on the other hand, is depicted by Scally using interlaced blue and maroon tracks of footprints walking without end across a bright yellow handprint, all against a deep brown background—a comment on the play’s strange, cyclical nature.
Brendan Foreman, on the other hand, is quite a different artist. His posters are stylistically diverse and uninhabited by the relative orderliness of Scally’s works: often comprising a busy intermingling of different elements all battling for space. Technically, he often branches out into different mediums, in one instance using Rubylith, a red-coloured masking film to create individual colour separations.
Whilst his posters are interesting, it’s his comments on them that bring this (admittedly quite small) exhibition to light. Foreman reflects much on the challenge of his artistic process. In his poster for Fergus Linehan’s Hotel Casanova, he writes about how he disliked the poster at the time because “it was such a struggle to make”, with all the elements “at odds with each other”. It is a refreshing touch, a pleasing humanisation of an artist seemingly obsessed with creating harmony out of discordance, drawing meaning out of disorder.
Poster Boys itself is, in truth, an altogether refreshing exhibition. Even more, it’s a strong step forward into the contemporary Dublin arts scene by the National Print Museum as it does its best to explore new and innovative spaces and punch well above its weight.
Poster Boys: The Work of Kevin Scally and Brendan Foreman for the Abbey Theatre, curated by Dr Linda King, is on display at the National Print Museum until December 2025. Admission is free.
