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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 a reprisal of her 1988 one-woman performance in Manfred Karge’s Man to Man.
Swinton’s return to the role, in which she plays a widow who takes on the identity of her deceased husband, is one of two star turns in David Byrne’s third season as artistic director, which will also feature Gary Oldman in another revival: Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which was first performed in 1958.
Byrne said the programme was inspired by going back to look at the theatre’s debut season and was “a year-long party” featuring “complete treats, which speak to where we are now and where we might be going next”.
When asked about the concerns over “star casting” in the West End and whether Swinton and Oldman fit into that trend, Byrne said: “In [the Royal Court’s] very first season George Devine talked Peggy Ashcroft into doing a Brecht, which was a huge departure; we’ve had Olivier in the Entertainer; when Max Wall came and did Ubu here he was the biggest musical hall star in the world and the set was designed by David Hockney.
“It’s always been part of what the Royal Court can do for new work … we want to be a place where world-class talent comes.”
There will be world premieres of Luke Norris’s romantic drama Guess How Much I Love You?, which stars Robert Aramayo and Rosie Sheehy – which Byrne described as being about “impossible choices and enduring love”.
Ryan Calais Cameron, who first worked with Byrne at the New Diorama, brings another world first to the stage in the guise of his play about the real-life Zambian space race story, the Afronauts, described by Byrne as a masterpiece.
The season will also include a couple of European premieres in the form of Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor is the Villain, which transfers from Broadway and is a loose retelling of the Crucible; while Rajiv Joseph’s Archduke retells the assassination of Franz Ferdinand with stage design by Es Devlin.
The theatre’s executive director, Will Young, said the programme was not 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 theatre will also collaborate with BBC Radio Four, with Mark Ravenhill – who made his name at the Royal Court with his play Shopping and Fucking – going through the archives and creating new adaptations of Royal Court plays.
Byrne inherited an in-tray full of issues at the Royal Court when he started in 2023. The theatre’s chair said the old business model that “supported the right to fail alongside success” was no longer sustainable, which led to a process that reshaped the literary department while redundancies loomed at the institution.
But after calls to allow the former artistic director of the New Diorama time to set out his vision, Byrne has successfully put his stamp on the theatre, using a mix of star wattage and experimental commissioning to get bums back on seats.
He said musicals would be a big part of his tenure, introduced a “collective” of associates including Ryan Calais Cameron and Mike Bartlett to help shape the programme and called for state support for young playwrights to avoid a “lost generation”.
His first season featured Ben Whishaw in an adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and John Lithgow in the Roald Dahl antisemitism drama Giant, which was directed by the former National Theatre artistic director Nicholas Hytner and transferred to the West End and then Broadway, where it launches in March 2026.
Byrne’s second season featured Robert Icke’s story of the Raoul Moat saga Manhunt and a revival of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. His approach has proven popular: in September the theatre announced it had sold out all its regular performances for the remainder of 2025.
Announcing his third season, Byrne told the Guardian: “With anniversaries you need to encapsulate something that is both of the past, of the moment and the promise. All those things need to sit in equilibrium.”
Debut work includes a story about cave-dwelling cannibals (Jack Nicholls’ The Shitheads), and a play about digital voyeurism and deepfake porn (Georgie Dettmer’s Are You Watching?). There is also a story about a pregnant woman who rents an Airbnb and inheritance (Blood of My Blood) and a Welsh community torn apart by a tragedy (Rhys Warrington’s Monument).
Isabella Sedlak and the Palestinian-Israeli writer and performer Yousef Sweid bring their acclaimed play Between The River and The Sea, which was originally produced by Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and was also on at the Edinburgh festival.
