Everyman announces 2018 repertory company season

The Liverpool Everyman has announced its company season, running for five months in spring 2018.

From March to July 2018, 14 as-yet-unnamed actors will come together to perform four shows.

The season will kick off with Paint Your Wagon: A Musical Play, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe.

The three other plays in the season will be an adaptation of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, both directed by Nick Bagnall, and Othello, directed by Gemma Bodinetz.

This follows the success of the Everyman's company season in 2017, the first year it adopted a repertory format since the '70s, when it had a famous troupe of actors which included Julie Walters, Pete Postlethwaite and Jonathan Pryce.

Artistic director Gemma Bodinetz and director Nick Bagnall announced their plans to return to this way of working in 2016.

Bodinetz said today: "We are still reeling from the joy and the intensity of this year's season and have attempted in our second season to build on all we have learned and all our audiences seemed to appreciate. If last season looked at our struggle to retain our humanity against all odds, then this season of plays looks at our attempts to shake it all up and do it differently."

The Everyman's autumn season includes a co-production of The Tin Drum with Kneehigh and West Yorkshire Playhouse, the UK premiere of Ken Ludwig's hit Baskerville and the rock ‘n' roll panto The Little Mermaid.

The Everyman has not yet confirmed who will form the group of 14 actors for the 2018 company, which will again bring together a diverse mix of experienced performers and emerging talent.

To encourage theatre makers of the future, the company will once again include a new young actor through the Young Everyman and Playhouse (YEP) traineeship placement.