Casting is announced today for the European premiere of Bathsheba Doran’s 2010 hit Off-Broadway two-hander Parents’ Evening, which has been relocated to the UK for its run at London’s Jermyn Street Theatre next month. Time to get booking!
Parents’ Evening, marking London-born playwright Bathsheba Doran’s return to the UK after years of stage and screen success in New York, runs at Jermyn Street Theatre from 3 to 27 October 2018, with a press night on 5 October.
“Would you please remember that it’s not us they’re assessing.”
She’s been disruptive in class. She’s rude to the teachers. And now she wants to learn the trumpet. But whose performance is really being judged? A mother and father prepare to discuss their daughter’s progress at the local primary school, but their rare opportunity for some quality time together begins to test the bonds of love, work and family.
The European premiere of Parents’ Evening, helmed by Jermyn Street’s deputy director Stella Powell Jones, will star RSC and Globe veteran Peter Hamilton Dyer (whose recent credits include Mrs Orwell, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Amy Marston (Offie nominated Best Actress for Broken Glass at Watford Palace Theatre, whose other recent credits include A Small Family Business at the National Theatre and Don John for Kneehigh).
Julianna Nicholson & James Waterston starred in the 2010 world premiere of Parents’ Evening in New York
When it premiered in 2010 at New York’s Flea Theater, Off-Broadway, Parents’ Evening was greeted with rave reviews, prompting TheatreMania to describe it as, “a compelling and absorbing new dramedy”. Doran’s 2011 premiere Kin was lauded by the New York Times as “a perfectly wonderful new play”, and the same paper described her 2015 work The Mystery of Love and Sex as “a piercing portrait of contemporary social architecture”.
Doran has transposed Parents’ Evening into a UK setting for its European premiere. The Jermyn Street Theatre production marks the homecoming of a major British talent already acclaimed in America. The production is directed by Stella Powell Jones and designed by Charlotte Espiner, with lighting by Will Reynolds and sound by Yvonne Gilbert.
Artistic Director of Jermyn Street Theatre, Tom Littler says:
“Bathsheba Doran is one of the most exciting voices in American playwriting and screenwriting at the moment, lauded for her distinctive voice, emotional honesty and sharp wit. But, in fact, she’s a Londoner, born and bred, and moved to New York some time ago. We are thrilled to be the first UK theatre to present the work of this major British playwright. Parents’ Evening is a painfully funny and wonderfully intimate play.”
Jermyn Street Theatre
About Jermyn Street Theatre
Jermyn Street Theatre is an art-house theatre in the heart of London’s West End. The 70-seat studio opened in 1994 and has since won numerous awards and transferred many productions to the West End and Broadway. In summer 2017, Tom Littler became artistic director and relaunched the venue as a producing house and a signatory to the Equity Fringe Agreement.
During the theatre’s first year as a producing venue, it has staged world premieres of five full-length plays (including Howard Brenton’s The Blinding Light), five one-act plays, two European premieres, and several revivals including the complete cycle of Noel Coward’s Tonight at 8.30. Jermyn Street Theatre has also reported that its weekly sales are up by over 50%, and it has employed 28 female and 26 male actors.
Parents’ Evening is the second play in Jermyn Street Theatre’s REBELS SEASON, which also includes the current production About Leo (to 29 September), Billy Bishop Goes To War by John Gray with Eric Peterson (31 October-24 November) and Burke and Hare by Tom Wentworth (28 November-21 December).
Bathsheba Doran
Bios
London-bred Bathsheba Doran’s plays include The Mystery of Love and Sex and Kin. She is a 2009 recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award and a Susan Smith Blackburn Award finalist. She moved to the US from the UK on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2000, received her Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University, and went on to become a playwriting fellow of The Juilliard School. Bathsheba will run the new HBO series Demimonde written by JJ Abrams. Most recently, she wrote and created espionage series Jerusalem for Channel 4 (on air next year) and was a co-Executive Producer on Hulu’s series The Looming Tower. Before that, she was a co-Executive Producer on Steve McQueen’s HBO project, Codes of Conduct. Previously, she was a co-Producer on Masters of Sex for Showtime, and a staff writer on Boardwalk Empire, where her episode received a WGA nomination. This is her European stage premiere.
Stella Powell Jones is Deputy Director of Jermyn Street Theatre. Her directing credits at the theatre include: Tomorrow at Noon and Boo Killebrew’s The Play About My Dad. Before joining Jermyn Street Theatre, Stella was based in the US, where her directing credits include Doran’s The Mystery of Love and Sex (Signature Theatre), Samuel D Hunter’s The Healing and Nick Jones’ Trevor (Circle X), which was nominated for Best Director and Best Production at the Ovation Awards.
