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Jermyn Street Theatre’s dynamic new Spring Season will focus on scandal and its impact, putting on stage four shocking stories that will outrage and delight.
Four plays will cast light on some of the extraordinary women who didn’t mind being the subject of scandal. Lanie Robertson’s Woman Before A Glass brings Peggy Guggenheim’s remarkable story to life. The world premiere of Mad as Hell will reveal the backdrop to Peter Finch’s iconic performance in Network.
The season also includes Maureen Duffy’s double-bill, Hilda & Virginia, looking back on Virginia Woolf’s life. And closing the season, Proud Haddock presents The Dog Beneath the Skin.
We spoke to Stella Powell-Jones, Deputy Director of Jermyn Street Theatre, to find out more about this exciting season of Scandal.
You’ve just announced your new season, Scandal, what can you tell us about it?
It’s all about people who break the rules. It opens with the UK premiere of Lanie Robertson’s play Woman Before a Glass, directed by Austin Pendleton, who is one of the great directors of New York and won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago. It’s about Peggy Guggenheim, who was the most important art collector and champion of the 20th century – she lived quite a life! Then we have Cassie McFarlane directing her own new play, Mad as Hell, which is about the Network star Peter Finch and his relationship with a Jamaican woman. Cassie is Jamaican and this is a story she’s wanted to tell all her life. Next is the world premiere of Maureen Duffy’s double-bill Hilda and Virginia, about Hilda of Whitby and Virginia Woolf. Maureen is an amazing writer and a veteran hero of the LGBTQ movement. And finally we have The Dog Beneath the Skin, by W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood – a very timely play from the 1930s about the rise of fascism in Europe, with echoes of Cabaret.
How does Scandal follow on from your last season?
The first season was Escape. It was about people trapped in different ways. This is about people breaking free.
Why do you think these four plays will appeal to audiences?
They are all amazing stories. That’s one of the things we look for when we’re programming, we want to be taken to places we don’t know, and told stories we’ve not heard. The audience will be gripped by all four of these stories.
Did you look for plays around the theme, or did the theme come from plays you had found?
A bit of both really! A couple of these were programmed a long time ago and then the others were programmed to fit around them. You want the plays to talk to each other. Then we have added some ‘Scandal Sundays’ – an evening of Venice celebrations, a day-long reading of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and an evening celebrating Auden and Isherwood’s remarkable collaboration.
How do you think the Jermyn Street Theatre space will help show off these plays?
We’re an intimate theatre. Everyone says that about studios, but we’re intimate – and it’s big enough that you can have a proper set and give a big performance. It’s romantic here – a secret place where we do impossible things.
The four plays feature extraordinary women, why was that important for Jermyn Street Theatre?
It’s important in everything we do. There are two sides to this. One is about providing an equality of opportunities – an equal number of jobs for female actors, production teams, directors and writers. But the other is about telling women’s stories. Woman Before a Glass is written and directed by two very talented men, but it’s about the female experience. We’re not trying to hold ourselves up as paragons of virtue here, and we have economic realities we must confront all the time – we know that we can be a lot more diverse in our programming, and we have a long way to go. But if we get two scripts, one about a woman and one about a man, we’ll read the one about the woman first!
Full details of the Scandal Season can be found here.
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