Jermyn Street Theatre Announces Summer and Autumn Season

Today, Jermyn Street Theatre announces a six-month programme featuring six world premieres and a major rediscovery. The Footprints Festival returns in July, headlined by Karina Wiedman's The Anarchist, winner of the Woven Voices Prize for Playwriting. The Temptation Season, which runs from mid-September to the end of the year, features the first major production of Dorothy L. Sayers' 1939 comedy Love All, together with the world premiere of Peter Gill's Something in the Air and the London premiere of John Nicholson's riotous The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary!

The 2021 Footprints Festival reopened the theatre with forty productions playing to socially distanced audiences. This year's Footprints Festival in July celebrates Jermyn Street Theatre's Creative Associates - nine emerging theatre-makers resident at the theatre for the next year. Their plays include Duck by maatin, directed by Imy Wyatt Corner, about a South Asian schoolboy's experience of elite cricket (12 July - 18 July); Shake the City by Millie Gaston, which tells the story of the Leeds clothworkers' strike of 1970 (12 July - 18 July); The Poison Belt, directed by Becca Chadder and adapted from the science-fiction novel by Arthur Conan Doyle (21 July - 30 July); and Dull Thuds of Love, written and directed by Stella Green, which reworks a creation story (21 July - 30 July). Footprints Festival is headlined by the previously announced winner of the Woven Voices Prize for migrant playwrights, The Anarchist (6 July - 30 July): Karina Wiedman's debut play, about a Belarusian woman's relationship to anarchism, is directed by the theatre's Carne Deputy Director, Ebenezer Bamgboye.

The autumn Temptation Season opens with a significant rediscovery. The theatre's Artistic Director, Tom Littler, directs the first major production of Love All by Dorothy L. Sayers, which runs 8 September - 8 October. Sayers remains well known for her bestselling detective fiction featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. In Love All, actress Lydia has abandoned the stage to elope to Venice with Godfrey, a writer of romantic fiction. But the pair soon quarrel and when Lydia hears of a mysterious female playwright taking the West End by storm, the stage is set for a hilarious comedy of misunderstanding and misbehaviour. Sayers' 1939 comedy was very briefly staged as war broke out, and here it receives its first full run.

Love All is followed by the world premiere of Peter Gill's Something in the Air, which runs 13 October - 12 November. Originally scheduled for 2020, Gill's lyrical new play juxtaposes a contemporary romance between two elderly men against memories of their youth in 1960s London. Gill's acclaimed body of writing includes Small Change, Kick for Touch, Versailles, and The York Realist. Gill co-founded the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court, ran Riverside Studios, and founded The National Theatre Studio. Gill co-directs with Alice Hamilton whose recent productions include The Dumb Waiter and The Memory of Water at Hampstead Theatre.

The Temptation Season concludes with The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! which runs 17 November - 17 December and was also previously planned for 2020. John Nicholson's adaptation of Gustave Flaubert's seminal novel was originally written for Peepolykus and previously staged in Liverpool and Bristol. Nicholson turns his trademark irreverent and uproarious humour to reinvent Flaubert's story of marital breakdown and domestic tragedy. It is directed by Marieke Audsley in her Jermyn Street Theatre debut.

A series of Sunday events and shorter runs pepper the summer and autumn programme, including Olivier Award winner Issy van Randwyck in Dazzling Divas (2 August - 7 August), Colin Elmer in Cult Figure: Kenneth Williams (9 August - 14 August), Stefan Bednarczyk celebrating forty years of cabaret artistry in Stefan and Friends (16 August - 20 August), Sian Phillips and Stephen Greif in Just a Little Murder (30 October), a reading of Unburied by Jimin Suh which was runner-up in the Woven Voices Prize (10 July) and a reading of The Misanthrope to mark Moliere's 400th birthday. There are also literary events marking the centenary of two great Modernist works: semi-staged performances of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (24 July) and James Joyce's Ulysses (4 December).

Artistic Director Tom Littler said: "It's been a pleasure to assemble this varied season which celebrates new work while honouring and rediscovering the theatrical and literary past. I hope audiences will be as delighted by Dorothy L. Sayers' lost comedy Love All as I was to discover it. In July, I cannot wait to see Karina Wiedman's The Anarchist which so excited the judges of the Woven Voices Prize, and all the work of our brilliant Creative Associates. It's an honour to premiere Peter Gill's latest play, a work of remarkable beauty and tenderness, alongside the very funny The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! Both these plays were originally slated for 2020 - a sharp reminder that we are still building our way back from the pandemic, and we're grateful for the support of our audiences, Friends and freelancers as we do so."

Jermyn Street Theatre is the West End's smallest producing theatre. The Stage's Fringe Theatre of the Year 2021, it is led by Artistic and Executive Directors Tom Littler and Penny Horner. The theatre won a 2022 Critics' Circle Award for its lockdown theatre, and Littler won the 2022 OffWestEnd Award for Best Artistic Director. The programme includes outstanding new plays, rare revivals, new versions of European classics, and high-quality musicals, alongside one-off musical and literary events. It collaborates with theatres across the world, and its productions have transferred to the West End and Broadway. During closure, the theatre responded with its Brave New World season of digital work, including the complete cycle of Shakespeare's sonnets performed by a mixture of graduating drama students and household names including Helena Bonham Carter and Olivia Colman and the acclaimed 15 Heroines with DigitalTheatre+ featuring adaptations of Ovid from writers including Juliet Gilkes Romero and Timberlake Wertenbaker.

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