Brits Off Broadway Festival line-up announced

The line-up for the annual Brits Off Broadway Festival has been announced with plays including Richard Bean's Toast and Alan Ayckbourn's Confusions to feature.

Bean's 1999 play, based on his experience working in a bread factory, is currently running at the Rose Theatre in Kingston and stars Matthew Kelly and Simon Greenall. The production, which ends its Kingston run in February and embarks on a short UK tour, will be presented at New York's 59E59 Theaters in April.

Ayckbourn has been featured at Brits various times and returns this year as the writer/director of two shows running in repertory, Confusions, a series of five interconnected one-act plays, and his latest work, Hero’s Welcome, which follows war hero Murray as he returns to the neighbourhood he once fled. Casting includes The Sound of Music Live! star Evelyn Hoskins.

Elsewhere in the line-up, Jame's Fritz' Edinburgh Festival hit Ross and Rachel will run from 17 May to 5 June, Philip Ridley’s Radiant Vermin, a satire about the current housing crisis, runs from 2 June to 3 July and Echoes by Henry Naylor which tells the parallel stories of two women born 175 years apart runs from 19 April to 3 July.

Brits off Broadway runs at New York's 59E59 Theaters from 19 April to 3 July. You can view the full line-up here.