Playwrights Alexi Kaye Campbell, Joe Penhall, David Eldridge, debbie tucker green, April De Angelis and Stella Feehily will all return to the Royal Court for its autum/winter season.
The work of these seasoned writers will be staged alongside the first piece from Rachel De-lahay, the latest writer to emerge from the one of the Royal Court’s writers’ schemes.
The Faith Machine, which opens the season in the Downstairs theatre, marks Campbell’s first return to the Sloane Square venue since the success of his debut play, the Olivier Award-winning The Pride. Starring Hayley Atwell, Ian McDiarmid and Kyle Soller, and directed by Jamie Lloyd, who also directed The Pride, it is the story of a life-changing decision which explores faith, capitalism and the meaning of love.
De Angelis’s Jumpy, which stars Olivier Award-winner and Friday Night Dinner star Tamsin Greig, follows The Faith Machine. Directed by writer/director Nina Raine, whose play Tribes ran at the Royal Court in 2010, Jumpy is a family drama questioning parental anxieties and life after 50.
Blue/Orange and Dumb Show writer Penhall returns to the Royal Court for the Christmas period with Haunted Child, a chilling play about a child who wakes at night, hears phantom voices then glimpses a figure prowling through the house.
The Downstairs season is completed by Eldridge’s latest play In Basildon, which will be directed by the Royal Court Artistic Director Dominic Cooke. In this new family drama from the writer of Under The Blue Sky and Knot Of The Heart, Len’s imminent death brings a family together to say goodbye, but as the spread is laid out, it’s hard to see who’s hungry and who’s just greedy.
The Upstairs season begins in early September with green’s truth and reconciliation, an epic tale spanning Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Zimbabwe and Bosnia.
Former Royal Court Artistic Director Max Stafford-Clark returns to direct Feehily’s Bang Bang Bang, which explores the world of charities, journalists and NGOs as a humanitarian worker and idealistic young colleague prepare for a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
De-lahay’s debut play The Westbridge, which closes the Upstairs season, is set in South London, where the accusation of a Black teenager sparks a disturbance on the streets.
The Royal Court’s autumn/winter season, the first to be staged with Coutts & Co as the theatre’s Principal Sponsor, will also include a revival of the Theatre Local scheme, which previously transferred productions to a disused shop in Elephant and Castle. A new location is due to be announced for the transfers of truth and reconciliation and The Westbridge.
MA