Jermyn Street Theatre announces nine-play Noël Coward series in new season
© Stephen Cummiskey
Jermyn Street Theatre has announced its third season as a producing venue.
Entitled The Reaction Season, it will feature 15 plays and musicals based on themes of reacting and re-enacting.
The season includes an ambitious staging of the first complete London revival of Noël Coward's Tonight at 8.30 since 1936. Running from 10 April to 20 May, the piece consists of a series of nine one-act plays in a mixture of styles including music-hall pastiche, light comedies and heartbreaking drama. The plays have been arranged into three trios, performed on consecutive nights, with all nine plays playing on Saturdays and Sundays. Casting for the shows, which run in rep, will be announced shortly.
The season also includes three new one-act plays that respond to Tonight at 8.30, entitled Tomorrow at Noon. The plays, written by Jenny Ayres, Emma Harding and Morna Young, run from 24 April to 15 May and are directed by the theatre’s deputy director Stella Powell-Jones.
From 30 May to 23 June, writer and novelist Esther Freud will premiere new show Stitchers, directed by BAFTA Award-winner Gaby Dellal. Based on a true story, the play follows the life of Lady Anne Tree who tried to teach needlecraft to prisoners.
American writer Boo Killebrew will present The Play About My Dad, which runs at the venue from 27 June to 21 July. Directed by Powell-Jones, the show is a metatheatrical take on a father-daughter relationship in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
A new homage to Edith Piaf, entitled Hymn to Love, will run from 25 July to 18 August and will star Olivier Award nominee Elizabeth Mansfield. A biographical take on a tragic part of Piaf's life, the show will feature 13 of Piaf's songs.
Artistic director Tom Littler said: "This is the most ambitious season in our 24-year history, and I am incredibly grateful to all of the people who have helped to set it up. I am very excited to be directing the whole of Noël Coward’s Tonight at 8.30 – in our intimate studio space, I think these plays can be revealed as works of extraordinary insight, wit, and emotional impact."
