A new play by Howard Brenton will mark the end of Edward Hall’s tenure as artistic director at the Hampstead Theatre.
Hall will direct the world premiere of Jude, a story loosely based on Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, which runs April 26-June 1.
Jude, a cleaner about to be fired for stealing a volume of Euripides, shocks her employer, a classics teacher at Oxford University, by translating ancient Greek on the spot. As she begins to fulfill her dream of studying at Oxford, she encounters the hidden barriers that accompany her background.
Hall said: “It has been a huge privilege to work with so many extraordinary people backstage and front during my time as artistic director, with writers such as Mike Bartlett, Martyna Majok, Beth Steel, Lauren Gunderson, Ryan Craig, Fiona Doyle and David Lindsay-Abaire to name but a few. But it is a particularly happy moment for me to be directing one of Howard Brenton's plays as my last.”
He added that Brenton is an artist “whose work lies at the very heart of the British theatre canon”.
