Tilda Swinton and Gary Oldman return to stage for Royal Court’s 70th anniversary | Royal Court theatre
Tilda Swinton will return to the stage for the first time in more than 30 years as part of the Royal Court’s 70th anniversary programme, in retaliation for her one-woman performance in Manfred Karge’s Man to Man in 1988.
Swinton’s return to the role of a widow who assumes the identity of her deceased husband marks one of two stars in David Byrne’s third season as artistic director; Gary Oldman also appears in another revival: Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, first performed in 1958.
Byrne said the program was inspired by going back to look back at the theatre’s first season and was “a year-long party” with “complete treats for where we are now and where we can go next.”
Luke Norris’ romantic drama Guess How Much I Love You?, starring Robert Aramayo and Rosie Sheehy, has world premieres – which Byrne described as being about “impossible choices and enduring love”.
Ryan Calais Cameron, who worked with Byrne for the first time in New Diorama, takes the stage with his play, breaking another world first. real-life Zambian space race The story in Afronauts, which Byrne describes as a masterpiece.
The season includes several European premieres in the form of Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain, which transferred from Broadway and is a loose retelling of the Crucible; Rajiv Joseph’s Archduke retells the assassination of Franz Ferdinand with stage design by Es Devlin.
Will Young, the theatre’s managing director, said the program was a combination of “safe bets and classic revivals” and that in a time of “cultural austerity” the Royal Court had a responsibility to invest in playwrights.
The theater will also collaborate with BBC Radio Four and team up with Mark Ravenhill, who made a name for himself with his play Shopping and Fucking at the Royal Court, to comb through the archives and create new adaptations of Royal Court plays.
Byrne inherited a platter of problems when he took up his post at the Royal Court in 2023. The theater’s president said the old business model was: “Supported the right to fail as well as success” was no longer sustainable, leading to a process that reshaped the literary department as layoffs loomed throughout the institution.
But after calls to let New Diorama’s former artistic director time to reveal your visionByrne has successfully made his mark on theater using a mix of star power and experimental commissioning. lie back on the seats.
he said musicals He formed a “collective” of partners, including Ryan Calais Cameron and Mike Bartlett, to help shape the programme, which would be a big part of his tenure, and called for government support for young playwrights to avoid a “lost generation”.
Its first season featured Ben Whishaw in an adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and John Lithgow starred in the Roald Dahl antisemitism drama Giant, directed by former National Theater artistic director Nicholas Hytner and transferring to the West End and then to Broadway, opening in March 2026.
Byrne’s second season featured Robert Icke’s story on the Raoul Moat epic Manhunt and a revival of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. His approach became popular: theater in September, All regular performances are sold out For the remainder of 2025.
His early works include a story about cave-dwelling cannibals (Jack Nicholls’s The Shitheads), a play about digital voyeurism and deepfake porn (Georgie Dettmer’s Are You Watching?). There’s a story about a pregnant woman renting an Airbnb and an inheritance (Blood of My Blood) and a Welsh community torn apart by tragedy (Rhys Warrington Memorial).
Palestinian-Israeli writer-artists Yousef Sweid and Isabella Sedlak bring their acclaimed play Among The River and The Sea, produced by Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater and also featured at the Edinburgh festival.
