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The Donmar Warehouse in London is to stage a “searing” dystopian play in which a teenage jury hold their elders to account for crimes against the climate. Dawn King, a British playwright, wrote The Trials.Foxfinder), is set in a near future in which a radical green government is in power and must manage scarce resources.
The Donmar’s artistic director, Michael Longhurst, who has dubbed the courtroom drama “12 Angry Young People”, described it as a punchy, galvanising and “quite shocking” play which changed his perception of the world.
The casting of jurors will be part of an engagement program with local community organizations in London. This will give 12 new actors the chance to make their stage debuts at the Donmar. Longhurst said he was committed to discovering the next generation of acting talent, in particular those “who don’t have the standard routes into the industry”.
The Trials, which were Nominated to the Susan Smith Blackburn awardIt is currently being staged in an entirely new production. Düsseldorfer SchauspielhausIn August, the Donmar will host its UK premiere. In King’s play, a jury of 12– to 17-year-olds struggle with the responsibility of weighing up the fate of three adult defendants. These three characters will be performed by well-known theatre actors. The production, directed by Natalie Abrahami, will be hard-hitting yet hopeful, said Longhurst, and explore “what we can do practically” in an age of climate emergency.
The Donmar, which last year appointed Zoë Svendsen as its climate dramaturg, is like many theatres striving to reduce its carbon footprint. The building was once used as a brewery and banana-ripening storage warehouse in Covent Garden. Recent renovations have improved ventilation and environmental sustainability.
The Trials is part of a new Donmar season that includes, in June, the European premiere of A Doll’s House, Part 2 by American dramatist Lucas Hnath which is set 15 years after Ibsen’s classic. Longhurst said it was audacious of Hnath to propose: “Do you know what this revolutionary masterpiece needs? A sequel!” Ibsen’s play famously ends with Nora slamming the door on her marriage; Hnath’s followup, directed by James Macdonald, opens with a knock at the door. “It’s like a series of showdowns as Nora has to face the people in her family household that she left – and they are not necessarily happy to see her,” said Longhurst. “The play forces Nora to weigh the choices that she made.”
Noma Dumbeni will play Nora. Starred as HermioneIn Harry Potter and the Cursed child in the West End and Broadway. This marks Dumezweni’s first return to the London stage since that success, after recently working in television (including The Undoing) and film (she is in Disney’s new version of The Little Mermaid, slated for release next year). Dumezweni will also feature in a upcoming photographic exhibition at We. Black Women curated by Joan Iyiola, for which actors – including Sheila Atim and Naomie Harris – have interviewed their unsung heroes.
The Band’s Visit, a “delicate and emotional” Israel-based musical adapted from the 2007 filmThe European premiere of the musical, which has the same name, will be held at the Donmar in autumn. David Yazbek and Itamar Moses’ musical triumphed on Broadway where it won 10 Tony awards in 2018. Longhurst will direct the new production. “Our USP is intimacy,” he said of the 251-seat venue he has run since 2019, “and it’s so unusual to be so close to a musical.”
In September, Tara theatre and the Donmar will collaborate to stage Silence. Kavita Puri’s Partition Voices: Untold British Stories. The production will celebrate 75 years of India’s partition. It will draw on the testimony and experiences of people who lived under the British Raj. Puri’s book has been adapted by four writers – Sonali Bhattacharyya, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Ishy Din and Alexandra Wood – in order to tell what Longhurst called a “story of division with a collective act of storytelling”.
Abdul Shayek, artistic director of Tara theatre, added: “As Britain holds up a mirror to its colonial history that has shaped our present day reality, many of us are asking questions of our past and who we are.” Silence, said Shayek, “will try to capture the unbiased documentation of the stories in Kavita’s book and the very real need to recognise that this is our shared history, a British story regardless of the colour of your skin”. The production will be performed at the Donmar and Tara theatres in Earlsfield, south west London.
