Scandal, Hysteria & Tempest in Bath Season Without Hall

The octogenarian director, who has helmed more than 30 productions as part of eight seasons with the Peter Hall Company at Bath, said in a statement that “directing Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays made the perfect ending to our work here.” Hall went on to thank the “very supportive Bath audience”, the venue and its director Danny Moar who has produced the seasons.

Main House

The Theatre Royal Bath will present three classic plays in the main house for the summer 2012 season. Donmar associate Jamie Lloyd will open the season on 10 July (previews from 5 July) with Sheridan’s The School for Scandal which runs until 21 July 2012.

A “romp through the lives and loves of the upper classes in the fashionable society of 18th century London,” The School for Scandal sees Sir Peter Teazle married to a young country girl in the hope that she will be too innocent to cause him any bother. His aims are thwarted when she takes up with the most outrageous set of scandalmongers in town; Lady Sneerwell, Mrs Candour and Sir Benjamin Backbite thrive on making mayhem from malicious tittle-tattle.

Casting for the 1777 comedy of manners, which will be designed by Soutra Gilmour, has still to be announced.

The production is followed by Terry Johnson‘s 1993 West End play Hysteria which Johnson will revive from 2 August 2012 (previews from 26 July) starring Antony Sher.

In 1939, 82-year-old Sigmund Freud, who has fled from Nazi-occupied Austria, settles down in a quiet Hampstead suburb where he aims to spend his dying days in peace. When surrealist painter Salvador Dali unexpectedly turns up in his study, along with a young woman who finds it impossible to keep her clothes on, all hell breaks loose.

Olivier Award-winner Antony Sher can currently be seen in the Tricycle Theatre’s West End transfer of Arthur Miller‘s Broken Glass which continues its limited run at the Vaudeville Theatre until 10 December 2011. Terry Johnson won the 2010 Tony Award for his direction of La Cage aux Folles.

Finally in the main house, Adrian Noble will helm Shakespeare’s The Tempest which runs from 28 August (previews from 23 August) to 8 September 2012.

Noble was the director of the 2011 Shakespeare Festival at the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego, California where he presented an open-air version of the production. Artistic director of the RSC from 1990 to 2003, his credits included Antony and Cleopatra with Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren; Hamlet and Henry V with Kenneth Branagh and Macbeth starring Jonathan Pryce.

Among myriad directing credits he has helmed several West End musicals including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Secret Garden. He is also signed on to direct the stage adaptation of David Seidler‘s The King’s Speech which tours from Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in spring 2012.

Ustinov Studio

The Ustinov Studio’s artistic director Laurence Boswell has also announced plans for his second season in charge of the venue, presenting the UK premieres of three American works.

Richard Beecham will open the season, directing Adam Rapp‘s 2006 Obie Award-winning play Red Light Winter. The play, which originally produced by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater and transferred for an Off-Broadway run, will run from 7 to 31 March 2012 (previews from 1 March).

Two thirty-something New Yorkers, Matt and Davis, once college room mates, go to Amsterdam to rekindle their friendship and get away from their lives. They find themselves thrown into a bizarre love triangle with a beautiful young prostitute named Christina. But the romance they find in Europe is eventually overshadowed by the truth they discover back home, the consequences of which will alter their lives forever.

Beecham also helms the Studio production of Howard Korder‘s In A Garden, which runs from 11 April (previews from 4 April) to 5 May 2012.

Set in 1989, the play follows an ambitious young American architect is summoned to a fictitious Middle Eastern country, where the Minister of Culture commissions him to build a structure which will remind him of his most idyllic childhood memory, the garden of his father. Dream turns to nightmare as months turn into years, a cat and mouse game ensues and the architect’s attempts to fulfil the brief are constantly rejected. In this veiled and dangerous world in which neither side is capable of understanding the other, the only outcome is catastrophe.

Howard Korder‘s Obie Award-winning play The Lights was seen at the Royal Court in 1996. He received a Pulitzer-Prize nomination in 1988 for his play Boys’ Life.

Finally, Laurence Boswell will direct Sarah Ruhl‘s Tony-nominated In The Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) which opens in the Studio on 16 May (previews from 10 May) and runs until 9 June 2012.

In a spa town in New York in the late 19th century enthusiasm for the new electric light bulb is spreading through the homes of the well-to-do citizens. Young Dr Givings is obsessed with the marvels of technology and has been working with a handy new device, a strange electric powered box set up in his operating theatre to treat female hysteria. Dr Givings’s first patient emerges from her first session beaming and keen to return for further treatment. But while the good doctor is blithely administering to his patients, his wife, Catherine, a new mother, is left feeling lonely and left out and forced to take matters into her own hands.

Based in historical fact, In The Next Room was nominated for three 2010 Tony Awards including Best Play.