New Vic 2025 Spring Season Will Stage Adaptation of A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH and More

The New Vic will follow up their critically-acclaimed production of The Company of Wolves and recent Broadway transfer of The Princess and The Pea with a season that includes a new version of an iconic British film adapted and directed by New Vic Artistic Director Theresa Heskins, alongside a world premiere of a previously unpublished play, by a Stoke-on-Trent-born cultural hero.

The theatre's season includes:

A new adaptation of the iconic Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death, directed by New Vic Artistic Director Theresa Heskins (The Company of Wolves, New Vic; Marvellous, premiere production @sohoplace; Olivier award-winning The Worst Witch, West End).

The world premiere of Arthur Berry's final play Whatever Happened to Phoebe Salt – celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Stoke-on-Trent's unsung cultural hero.

A new production of Alison Carr's innovative theatrical ‘pub quiz' - The Last Quiz Night on Earth.

New Vic Artistic Director Theresa Heskins said: “The New Vic stage and auditorium keeps pushing us to be ever more inventive both creatively and technically. For Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death a huge challenge is presented – how to create a stairway to heaven in a theatre-in the-round? I'm looking forward to exploring that challenge with an inspiring creative team and staging another impossible-to-stage play. Alison Carr's 2020 play The Last Quiz Night on Earth will take advantage of the inclusiveness of the round too, with the audience becoming the regulars at the Four Horsemen Pub.

 

“Arthur Berry was writing specifically for our theatre-in the round with Whatever Happened to Phoebe Salt. It's such a privilege to be producing his final play, written for the New Vic in 1988 but never performed.  Berry was a local cultural icon – playwright, poet, painter, broadcaster and raconteur – at a time when regional voices were regarded as precisely that.  But when we took our production of Marvellous, the story of Neil Baldwin, to the West End's newest theatre @sohoplace, and were asked by people from Kentucky to Korea whether it might tour to them, we realised how much the world has changed.  It's time for Berry's unique voice to be heard by a wider audience, and we hope this ‘rediscovery' will be the beginning.”

 

A Matter of Life and Death by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger will open on the New Vic stage on Friday 28 March and runs until Saturday 19 April. Seamlessly blending together romance, drama and fantasy, this new adaptation by Theresa Heskins will feature an amazing live swing band that will bring the era of the story to life and take audiences on an emotional journey, exploring what happens when love, fate and the laws of the universe collide.

 

Alison Carr's innovative theatrical comedy The Last Quiz Night on Earth will be directed by Anna Marsland (The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, New Vic; The Midwives' Play, Almeida Theatre) and will take place at the New Vic from Saturday 8 February to Saturday 1 March. This hilarious but heartfelt comedy explores how people might spend their last night together – when a pub quiz takes place just as a massive meteor hurtles towards Earth.

 

In June, the New Vic will celebrate the life of local unsung hero Arthur Berry with the world premiere of Whatever Happened to Phoebe Salt. Filled with vivid storytelling and rich characters, and capturing the soul of working class life that Berry was renowned for, the production opens on Saturday 31 May until Saturday 21 June and will be directed by Abbey Wright (The Mountaintop, New Vic; Mrs Lowry and Son, Trafalgar Studios). This will be the first opportunity to see the never-before-performed Berry play on the stage it was originally written for.

 

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