Announcing my next show

I'm so excited to share this with you

Dear friends,

I’m so delighted to finally be able to share with you my next show. I’m directing Are You Watching? at the Royal Court Theatre, opening in May this year. The play is by the brilliant Georgie Dettmer, and I couldn’t be more excited to be working on it.

More information here

The play handles some really dark material. Essentially, it asks us to examine our cultural responses to events of horror. I’ll let you come and see the play to know more, but it is an unflinching and shocking piece of work - a mosaic play, presenting several different narrative strands and allowing the audience to make their own connections between them. The show asks us to reflect on our own relationship with witnessing, what it means to invest our attention in something, and how much a part of something we are, if we are watching.

It’s something of a dream come true for me, to work at the Royal Court. In this building, I’ve had some of my most formative artistic experiences. From the iconoclasm and shocking politics of Posh by Laura Wade, which I saw with my mum on my 21st birthday while I was a student at Oxford; to Polly Stenham’s No Quarter in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, where our play will be.

Are You Watching? feels like a very Royal Court play. When I first read it, it completely seemed in the great heritage of plays here in this building which refuse to shy away from the worst parts of human nature. Edward Bond’s Saved, back in 1965; Sarah Kane’s Blasted, in the very same auditorium where our show will be. These were plays I read as a young person which transformed my understanding of what theatre can do. That storytelling that involves the body is some of the most powerful, compelling and terrifying we can do. To be a link in the chain of these artists telling stories that are so confronting is an incredible feeling.

I’ll write more, here, about the process of making the show - and how to include care, compassion and emotional safety when working with such charged material. I won’t give spoilers so if you’re planning to see the show, these letters should only enhance your experience of it, rather than giving anything away. I feel so proud to be working with such an amazing team of actors - announced yesterday in the press - and my incredible creative team: Georgia Wilmot designing, Xana sound designing, Beth Gupwell lighting designing.

Thanks for reading - and hope to see you in the audience.

You’re brilliant.
J x