Rose Theatre Kingston today announces the cast for the world première of My Brilliant Friend, a two-part adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet of novels which have become a global literary sensation. Niamh Cusack and Catherine McCormack lead the cast as Lenu and Lila, with the cast completed by Justin Avoth, Adam Burton, Martin Hyder, Victoria Moseley, Emily Mytton, Ira Mandela Siobhan, Jonah Russell, Badria Timimi, Toby Wharton and Emily Wachter. The production directed by Melly Still opens on 11 March, with previews from 25 February, running until 2 April.
Elena Ferrante’s intense portrait of an all-consuming female friendship in post-war Italy is brought to life for the first time on the Rose stage.
This modern family saga chronicles the lives of friends, Elena and Lila, following them from their childhoods in a poor, tough neighbourhood of Naples, through passionate love affairs, burgeoning careers and family struggles. But even as life repeatedly tries to pull the two in separate directions, Elena and Lila remain inextricably bound to one another.
A powerful story of love, violence, sex, ambition, genius and self-destruction, the two-part play is an exploration not just of female friendship and rivalry, but of post-war Italy and the decades of political turmoil and cultural change that followed.
This stage adaptation condenses Ferrante’s four novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child) into one play presented in two parts. Audiences will be able to see both parts in one day, or on separate days.
Regarded as ‘one of the most exciting and compelling contemporary literary voices today’, Elena Ferrante was chosen this year as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people on the planet. Very little, however, is known about the author – she writes under a pseudonym, explaining: ‘Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing’. Her first novels were published in the early 1990s, with My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in the Neapolitan quartet, translated into English in 2012, and the final book in the quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.
