The Royal Court has announced an exciting line-up for its March 2018 – January 2019 season, with Debbie Tucker Green, Mark Ravenhill and Anthony Neilson all set to return to the Sloane Square venue with new works.
The enticing announcement features 10 world premiere plays, a collaboration with BBC4, and the news that the Samuel French Bookshop, which closed its doors in April 2017, will reopen in the Royal Court Balcony Bar, from Monday 5 March.
The Royal Court’s Balcony Bar
The season at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, the Royal Court’s larger venue, opens with Thomas Eccleshare’s Instructions For Correct Assembly (Saturday 7 April – Saturday 19 May), a darkly comic play exploring the failure of modern parenting. Eccleshare’s Court debut is directed by Hamish Pirie, and centres on two parents who attempt to follow a simple manual to parenthood.
This is followed by Pity (Thursday 12 July – Saturday 11 August) by Rory Mullarkey (The Wolf From The Door, Saint George & The Dragon), a fun and probing take on life in contemporary England, and then New Work (Friday 21 September – Saturday 6 October) by Debris Stevenson, in which the young performer uses music, movement, lyrics and poetry to recall how London’s grime scene gave her permission to battle to find her voice.
Debbie Tucker Green, whose previous play ‘a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion…’, won great acclaim at the Royal Court last year, returns with Ear For Eye (Thursday 25 October – Saturday 24 November), a major new work which explores the brutal effects of institutional and systemic racism. The Jerwood Theatre Downstairs season is then closed by Mark Ravenhill’s (Shopping And F**king) The Cane (Thursday 6 December – Saturday 26 January 2019), a play about a teacher set to imminently retire – but suffering at the hands of a mob of angry students, who are determined to inflict revenge for years of control.
The Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
Meanwhile, in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, the Royal Court’s more intimate venue, Anthony Neilson (Unbreakable) returns with new drama The Prudes (Wednesday 18 April – Saturday 2 June), about the sex life of a long-term couple; One For Sorrow (Wednesday 20 June – Saturday 11 August), an exposé of liberal fear by Cordelia Lynn; Rob Evans’ dark psychological play The Woods (Wednesday 5 September – Saturday 13 October); and new writer Ellie Kendrick’s debut play Hole (Wednesday 28 November – Saturday 12 January 2019), a wild rage against what it is to be woman in today’s universe.
In other news, director Ola Ince has been invited to programme The Site, the Royal Court’s third space, in the autumn of 2018, while in a collaboration with BBC the Royal Court will commission a number of female playwrights to work on a project to mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918, which will be broadcast on BBC4 this summer.
Tickets for the new season go on general sale on Friday 16 February through the Royal Court website.