Following her sell-out productions of J.M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows and Quality Street last year, director Louise Hill returns to the Finborough Theatre with Sutton Vane’s 1920s West End and Broadway hit Outward Bound.

Outward Bound tells the story of seven passengers who meet in the saloon bar of a ship as it sets sail from an unidentified English port. Socialite Mrs Cliveden-Banks is on her way to join her husband, a Colonel in the army; Mr Lingley has important business in Marseilles; charlady Mrs Midget is making her first passage by sea; Reverend William Duke is looking forward to a holiday, while Tom Prior intends to spend the journey in the ship’s saloon bar. Also on board are Henry and Ann, a young couple who seem anxious for the ship to leave port. But the travellers have more in common than they dare to suspect. Out at sea, an eerie calm settles over the ship as Tom is the first to discover the fate which awaits his fellow passengers.

First produced in the Everyman theatre in Hampstead, Outward Bound became the biggest hit of the 1923 season and went on to play in the West End for many years afterwards.