The Fever follows a traveller from a privileged background who visits an impoverished foreign country and suddenly becomes ill. As her temperature begins to rise, she becomes emotionally unsettled and contemplates with lacerating frankness the impact her life has had on the world.

Wallace Shawn’s play turns up the heat on individual responsibility and the balance of power, asking: “Can we, should we, make the world a fairer place?”

Higgins, who stars in The Fever, is recognised as one of Britain’s finest stage actresses of her generation. Her career has seen her honoured with three Laurence Olivier Awards, all in the category of Best Actress; Sweet Bird Of Youth (1995), Vincent In Brixton (2003) and Hecuba (2005). More recently she has been seen on the stage of the National Theatre Olivier in productions of Major Barbara and Oedipus.

Higgins is directed in The Fever by Royal Court Artistic Director Dominic Cooke who recently described playwright Shawn as “a true iconoclast… He is a daringly inventive, experimental playwright who exposes, with painful honesty, the dualities of liberalism in a divided world.” The winner of the 2007 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director, for Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Crucible, Cooke has recently directed Now Or Later, The Pain And The Itch and Rhinoceros.

The Fever plays as part of the Wallace Shawn season which also includes Jane Horrocks starring in Aunt Dan And Lemon, and Shawn’s first new play in 10 years, Grasses Of A Thousand Colours.