Nunn Follows Plays with Porgy & Bess???

Trevor Nunn is keeping busier than ever. After two big plays – next month’s revival of Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun at the National, which launches this year’s Travelex £10 Season in the Olivier, and June’s world premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Rock 'n' Roll at the Royal Court – he’ll return to the realm of big musicals. Or to be more precise in this case, jazz operas. Nunn will direct a major new West End revival of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess. Originally a novel by DuBose Heyward, who adapted it as a stage play two years after its publication in 1925, the story is set in 1912 South Carolina, around Charleston's Catfish Row, and centres on cripple Porgy who offers shelter to Bess, recently broken free from her brutish lover. Heyward later collaborated with George and Ira Gershwin to create the 1935 jazz opera whose now-classic songs include "Summertime", "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'" and "It Ain't Necessarily So". A 1959 screen version starred Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge. Nunn’s production is expected to open this autumn in the West End, possibly at the Savoy Theatre, currently the home of The Rat Pack.

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