Gate Theatre announces 2018-19 season

The Gate Theatre has announced its new season, the second for the venue's artistic director Ellen McDougall.

Jean Cocteau's French play The Human Voice, which follows a woman's fight for the person she loves, will be presented in a brand new translation by Daniel Raggett (who also directs the show). Running from 13 September to 6 October, the new production marks 34 years since the same play was first produced at the Gate Theatre.

Anna Himali Howard will direct A Small Place, adapted from Jamaica Kincaid's essay of the same name. Exploring western colonialism and the exploitation of nations around the world, the piece runs from 8 November to 1 December.

McDougall will direct Dear Elizabeth by Susan Smith Blackburn award winner Sarah Ruhl (In the Next Room, or the vibrator play). Following the correspondences of two famed poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, the show runs from 17 January to 9 February.

The venue's associate director Anthony Simpson Pike will present a version of Wolfram Lotz's The Ridiculous Darkness, translated by Daniel Brunet. Billed as a surreal mash-up between Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, the production runs from 27 February to 23 March.

Simpson Pike will also lead a new young associates project entitled Harambee across the summer of 2018, looking at important moments in British civil rights history and the prominence of Notting Hill and the surrounding area.

In July 2019, the Gate will partner with Shubbak – London's largest festival of contemporary Arab culture – to present a powerful programme of voices from Arab theatre-makers.

McDougall said of the new season: "As with last year, there's no theme to the season, it's a deliberately eclectic range of stories, perspectives, forms, artists – concluding with a brand new collaboration – this time with Shubbak. The season charts the differences and divisions between us, and the enormous lengths we go to reach each other. All these questions I hope are felt all the more profoundly in our intimate, ever-changing space."