Describe the Night digital programme

DESCRIBE THE NIGHT

BY RAJIV JOSEPH DIRECTED BY LISA SPIRLING

D OW N S TA I R S

MAIN STAGE

WHAT’S ON GENESIS INC.

BY JEMMA KENNEDY DIRECTED BY LAURIE SANSOM 22 JUNE – 28 JULY

THE PHLEBOTOMIST

BY ELLA ROAD DIRECTED BY SAM YATES 12 APRIL – 19 MAY

THE STR ANGE DEATH OF JOHN DOE

WEST END

BY FIONA DOYLE DIRECTED BY EDWARD HALL 25 MAY – 30 JUNE

PLAYFUL PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS HAMPSTEAD THEATRE’S

THE MODERATE SOPRANO

BY DAVID HARE DIRECTED BY JEREMY HERRIN 5 APRIL – 30 JUNE | DUKE OF YORK’S THEATRE LEICESTER SQUARE

CAROLINE, OR CHANGE

BOOK & LYRICS BY TONY KUSHNER MUSIC BY JEANINE TESORI DIRECTED BY MICHAEL LONGHURST 20 NOVEMBER – 9 FEBRUARY | THE PLAYHOUSE THEATRE EMBANKMENT

WELCOME Producing new plays is a profoundly uncertain business. An unproduced script arrives without a road map, and none of the many collaborators involved in any production, who might feel completely confident with a Shakespeare or a Shaw, can proceed with their accustomed sure-footedness. And when, as happens, things don’t go to plan, important or interesting plays risk finding themselves abandoned at the side of the road… Now, we’ve been obsessively reading drafts of Describe the Night since long before its recent New York premiere.

That outing marked only a stage in an evolutionary process, and we were delighted to offer Rajiv Joseph the opportunity of an immediate creative segue: for him to continue his work on the play with the aim of bringing it to its definitive condition in London.

And the play felt urgent anyhow. As I write, the West’s confrontation with Russia is accelerating at an alarming rate, and it seems important that informed citizens of the West quickly develop a better understanding of Russian politics and of how Russia now uses ‘public diplomacy’. Obviously Joseph’s play is not a political primer or narrow polemic, but there is something about its poetry and its disruptive mischief that takes us deeper into the subject than a lecture ever could. At its heart lies the Russian state’s flexible relationship with Truth and the origins and implications of that flexibility, which is currently being taken to unprecedented extremes. The Cold War’s sophisticated denunciations of Western ideology have given way to a playground game of claim and counter-claim played out across the global media. This is a game in which Truth is irrelevant, only plausibility matters, and it is accompanied by an insidious campaign to undermine and discredit established international media outlets, a campaign supported by the subversive colonisation of Social Media platforms. The aim is apparently to bewilder the citizens of the West – to make it so difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood that they simply give up trying…

Of course, Joseph’s play is also a vastly entertaining yarn: an enthralling slice of magical realism from a master storyteller. And I am delighted that he and Lisa Spirling hit it off so well: her work is always marked by clarity and rigour and she has kindly taken time off from being Artistic Director of Theatre503 to make this her seventh production for us. I hope you enjoy it.

EDWARD HALL ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

THE WILL MORTIMER INTERVIEW WM Between your first degree and coming to New York, you spent three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal. Tell me about that.

RJ I had studied creative writing as an undergraduate and I realised I needed something to write about. I grew up in Ohio and I felt I really needed to broaden my horizons, so I applied for the Peace Corps, went to Senegal and spent three and a half years there.

Knowing that I wanted to be a writer, I started writing a journal the day I left home and I kept it religiously: I have now been keeping a journal for 21 years. But those first three and a half years in Senegal were the most intense ‘journaling’ I have done, because in some way it became my therapy. I was thrust into a new and frightening world where there was no-one else to speak English to, so I had bouts of loneliness, bouts of self-doubt and the journal really helped me through that. In some ways that experience made me into a writer, and it was my fascination with journals that led to my reading the Isaac Babel 1920 diary which inspired Describe the Night.

WM Had you always seen yourself as a playwright?

RJ When I studied creative writing, my ambition was to be a novelist, and in Senegal that was still my ambition. When I came back to the United States and moved to New York City, I decided I wanted to be a screenwriter and I was accepted onto NYU’s dramatic writing programme as a screenwriter. But once I was there and started taking courses and seeing new plays by leading playwrights in New York, my life changed completely because I realised that I was much more attracted to that sort of work.

WM If you had been a novelist, what sort of novelist would you have been?

RJ Well, my big influences were – and still remain – Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera…

WM …Magical realism? That’s certainly there in your playwriting…

RJ Well, what I enjoy about the theatre is the ‘theatricality’ of it, the fact that in live performance the use of metaphor – the use of magic – is accepted in a different way from when it’s used in film. And

I find that when I write or attempt to write naturalistic plays – although I love naturalistic plays written by other people – I fail. Because the idea bores me.

WM My sense is that Describe the Night is very different from the body of your work. Is that your view as well?

RJ Yes, but I would also say that all my plays tend to be different from one another. I don’t think there is any overarching ethos that connects the plays and I tend to jump around in my choice of subject matter...

WM But there’s something about the scale of this...

RJ True, I have never written something quite this epic in scale, and that was part of the appeal. When I started writing Describe the Night I wanted to create a wide spreading narrative in which stories connect across generations. My aim was that part of the experience and the enjoyment of watching the play would be that when a story that took place in 1920 connected with a story that takes place in 2010, the connection and the realisation of how it connects should be simultaneously deeply satisfying and moving.

WM Russia... has that been an abiding interest?

RJ Well, I have been very interested in Vladimir Putin for the last ten years or so. A writer friend once asked me ‘which celebrity would it most blow your mind to meet?’ and I replied immediately that Putin would be the most surprising person one could possibly meet in the entire world. And then I asked myself: ‘why do I think that? What’s so fascinating about him?’ and I realised that he seems terrifying and also somehow immortal... he seems to me to have mythic status, to almost be a sort of mythological beast...

WM I can see that… Your admiration for Babel, tell me about that...

RJ I read Babel’s short stories in college, and found them fascinating because I thought they were bizarre: unexpected, dark, perverse and profane. And when I found his 1920 diary many years later I was even more taken with him, because – as someone who keeps a diary himself – I was very interested in how writers note down their thoughts. In fact, the diary is only

THE HAMPSTEAD THEATRE LITERARY MANAGER TALKS TO THE WRITER

RAJIV JOSEPH fragments: one section ends mid-sentence, and it picks up forty pages later. It’s absolutely not to be read as a narrative.

WM And how did you come to zero in on the love triangle between Babel, Yezhov and Yezhov’s wife Yevgenia?

RJ Once I started doing the research about Babel’s unlikely friendship with Nikolai Yezhov, the titbit that Babel had an affair with Yevgenia was far too fascinating – and titillating – to ignore and it immediately became a focus of the play.

WM Let’s talk about the larger triangle: the intersection of the three narrative strands.

How did you select the material?

RJ When I came across the 1920 diary I had started wondering about writing a play about Babel. But when the plane crash at Smolensk took place in 2010, a lot of the articles that were written about it talked about how this brought back to light generations of conflict between Russia and Poland. And I was surprised to realise that I knew about this history and about the Russo-Polish war from Babel’s diary and his Red Cavalry stories. I thought that there might be a connection to be made. But these two strands are chronologically far apart – 2010 to 1920-1940 – so what was required was a third panel that I could fit in. That ended up being about a young, hungry, somewhat insecure KGB agent in Dresden in 1989...

WM The play was developed using workshop techniques?

RJ I worked with graduate acting students from NYU using a version of The Joint Stock Method.

I effectively had eight very intelligent research assistants who were going out into the world, bringing back research and performing it for me.

It was a wonderful way to work. I also did a lot of reading and we had people come in and speak to us: Val Vinokur, who is a renowned Babel scholar talked to us about Babel’s life, and a Polish filmmaker who has dedicated his life to uncovering the truth about the air crash showed us his movie and talked to us about his work.

WM Have you used workshop techniques of that sort before?

RJ No, I have never worked from such an early stage of the process with actors. I hope to do so again, because it’s a fascinating approach. What is interesting is that you are sort of relieved of your own tendencies, and the narrative will inevitably take unexpected turns. And maybe that answers your question about why this play seems unlike other of my plays.

WM How dramaturgically formed was the material you had at the end of that process and how did you go about creating the play’s final form?

RJ To describe the material that I had at the end of the process with the NYU students as being in any form would be a joke, because it was essentially formless. I honed it, and I cut characters and cut scenes, and then I set about creating a balanced structure. That didn’t have to be exact, for instance the 2010 scenes which are at the beginning and at the end act as bookends, but the play actually opens with the 1920 scene... I wanted a sort of balance but I also wanted it to feel like a mobile – to float – in the right way. And it developed organically: four scenes in each act, each act more or less the same length, and in each act we do not spend too much time in any one era. So the final form resulted from achieving that balance.

WM You say very clearly – twice actually in the script – no dialects, no accents. Talk to me about that…

RJ In my plays accents would act as a sort of cheap hairpiece, a cheap wig where you could see the artifice. And they would make no sense: in my play Guards at the Taj, where I also specify no accents are to be used, the characters wouldn’t be speaking English at all… That’s also true of Describe the Night but here you’ve got different people from different parts of the world, different cities, different cultures and so their accents should actually be a part of the conversation, and I have included this sort of running joke about ‘What’s your accent?’ ‘What accent is that?’ so the audience understands that what the characters are hearing is not what they are hearing.

WM Let’s talk a bit about Post Truth, because that does seem to be at the heart of what you are writing about. Did you set out with a plan or did that just emerge as you were developing the piece?

RJ I set out with a plan, but three years ago we weren’t talking about this the way we are today: fake news was not a term and Donald Trump wasn’t in the headlines except as a Reality TV show host. But I have always been very interested in the lies that make it into the history books: my personal opinion is that all history is – in some ways – a lie. It’s certainly never the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So the idea of a fiction writer, a poet, a playwright, a novelist being able to tell the history of a place in his own lifetime in a different way to the history books appeals to me. Babel vs Yezhov and Stalin is the dichotomy here. I was really interested in the idea of lies: in the opening scene that launches the play Babel and Yezhov are actually coming to an understanding about what a lie is...

WM Of course, because of the post-Soviet dispensation, it is possible for the Russians to re-write history in a way that isn’t possible elsewhere.

RJ Yes, and I think the Russians have found a new way of doing that via the infiltration of Social Media and they have used that very deftly. I think we are in a high risk point in the development of human reliance on technology, and the Russians are taking full advantage of that. That’s how they influenced the US election, using social media to disseminate information and to challenge the veracity of established news sources. That questioning of news sources is now ubiquitous, of course, with people on the Right describing the New York Times as a ‘fake news rag’, which is simply untrue. But this distrust of the media has metastasised and now we have a president who encourages that and fans the flames of distrust.

WM Do you think the Russian use of those techniques is down to the fact that they have a government run by a lot of ex-spies?

RJ Absolutely! It’s fascinating and it’s impressive and one should never forget that. The KGB runs Russia like they never went out of style...

WM But the play isn’t just an exegesis of the transformation of NKVD/KGB tradecraft into politics.

You also have fun as a kind of ‘unreliable playwright’, bending your factual characters’ biographies…

RJ Well, let’s go back to the first scene of the play where those two men discuss what’s true and what’s not true; what’s a lie and what’s a fact, and try to get to the heart of how difficult that distinction is. Truth is what happens and false is what doesn’t happen... but how does one describe what happens? Two people describe the same thing, and their descriptions differ.

Is one description more true that the other? It’s that which led me down this path of mixing fact and fiction; of mixing truth and lies and playing with that, having fun with that. That made the piece fun to write and I think that’s what makes it fun to watch. And that mischief is central to what the play is: it’s not a history lesson, if you want a history lesson, it’s very easy to get one and you don’t need to come to the theatre.

WM But do you think that there’s a risk that the play’s serious purpose might be obscured by the playfulness?

RJ I hope it’s all part of one rich blend. There is, of course, a risk with any play that proceeds in this way that a certain part of the audience will be confused by it. And whilst I would prefer it if every audience member came out cheering my name in praise, that’s never the case...

WM Finally, how do you see the political situation with Russia developing?

RJ I think that the sooner we can impeach the President of the United States, the sooner we can start to resolve matters. That’s honestly my opinion.

DAVID BIRRELL RAJIV JOSEPH & LISA SPIRLING

STEVE JOHN SHEPHERD

THE SMOLENSK AIR CRASH On 10 April 2010, a Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft of the Polish Air Force crashed near the city of Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 people on board.

Among the victims were the President of Poland Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria, the last Polish President-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski, the Chief of the Polish General Staff and other senior Polish military officers, the President of the National Bank of Poland, Polish Government officials, 18 members of the Polish Parliament, senior members of the Polish clergy and relatives of victims of the Katyn massacre.

The Katyn massacre of 1940, aimed at destroying the entire Polish aristocracy, bourgeoisie and elite, was carried out by Soviet forces (it was originally Beria’s idea to liquidate all the captured Polish officers). Of the 22,000 killed, 8,000 were military officers, 6,000 Police officers and the rest were intelligentsia described by the Soviets as intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests. When the atrocity was discovered (in 1943, ironically by German forces during Hitler’s invasion of Russia) Stalin blamed the Nazis and the USSR stuck to this story until 1990.

Only under Gorbachev did they accept responsibility.

The group was arriving from Warsaw in April 2010 to attend an event commemorating the 70 th

anniversary of the massacre, which took place not far from Smolensk.

The pilots were attempting to land at Smolensk North Airport – a former military airbase – in thick fog, with visibility reduced to about 500 metres (1,600 ft).

The aircraft descended far below the normal approach path until it struck trees, rolled inverted and crashed into the ground, coming to rest in a wooded area a short distance from the runway.

Both the Russian and Polish official investigations found no technical faults with the aircraft, and concluded that the crew failed to conduct the approach in a safe manner in the given weather conditions. The Polish authorities found serious deficiencies in the organisation and training of the Air Force unit involved, which was subsequently disbanded. Several high-ranking members of the Polish military resigned, under pressure from politicians and the media.

Various conspiracy theories about the crash have since been in circulation, and are promoted by some senior political figures in Poland, who claim the crash was a political assassination. No evidence supporting this version has yet been found in Polish and international investigations.

10 April, 2010 – Smolensk, Russia – Police block the plane crash site at Smolensk North military airport where a fragment (a wing) of the crashed TU-154 plane landed.

THE KREMLIN’S HALL OF MIRRORS:

POST-TRUTH AND THE INFORMATION-PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR

BY PETER POMERANTSEV In early 2014, Crimea was taken over by soldiers who seemed Russian and sounded Russian but who were wearing no national insignia and who, Vladimir Putin told the world with a little grin, were not Russian.

Later, when Eastern Ukraine was being taken over by separatists, Russian state television news was full of plump, weeping women and elderly men who told tales of Ukrainian nationalists beating up Russianspeakers. These witnesses seemed genuine enough, but Margo Gontar noticed the same plump women and injured men appearing in different newscasts, identified as different people. In one report, a woman

The stories were glaringly sloppy, as if their creators did not care about being caught and just wanted to distract from the evidence that Russian-backed militias had shot down the plane. Gontar began to wonder whether she was falling into a Kremlin trap by spending too much time trying to debunk its obviously fake stories.

At times like this, she had always reached out to Western media for a sense of something solid, but this was starting to slip too. Whenever the BBC or Tagesspiegel published a story, they also presented the Kremlin’s version of events for balance. Gontar

‘IF THE TRUTH WAS CONSTANTLY SHIFTING AND THERE WAS ANOTHER SIDE TO EVERY STORY, WAS THERE ANYTHING SOLID TO HOLD ON TO?’ would be an ‘Odessa resident’, next she would be a ‘soldier’s mother’, then a ‘Kharkiv resident’ and then an ‘anti-Maidan activist’. Gontar started posting research on a myth-busting website called StopFake, which had been created by volunteers at the journalism school of Mohyla University in Kiev. It was a way of fighting back.

There were also images of dead children on news sites and social media next to headlines that blamed the deaths on Ukrainian fascist gangs trained by NATO. She could usually locate the original images of the dead with a simple Google search. Some of the photographs were from other, older wars; some were from crime scenes that had nothing to with Ukraine; some came from movies. It felt good to sort truth from lies, to feel certainty amidst so much confusion.

That July, after the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Eastern Ukraine, Gontar started picking up shards of pro-Russian conspiracy theories.

She came across the Twitter feed of an air-traffic controller who had spotted Ukrainian army jets following the plane, but could find no evidence that he actually existed. She found dozens of sites in Russian and English which suddenly argued that the US had shot down MH17 in a botched attempt to target Putin’s personal jet. There were even claims, circulated by Russian separatist leaders in Ukraine, that the plane had been filled with corpses before it had taken off – a plotline lifted from the BBC TV series Sherlock.

began to wonder whether her search for certainty was futile: if the truth was constantly shifting and there was another side to every story, was there anything solid to hold on to? After months working at StopFake, she began to doubt everything. Who was to say that ‘original’ photo of a dead child she found was genuine? Maybe that, too, had been placed there? Reality felt malleable. Whatever the Russians were doing, it was not propaganda, which is intended to persuade but is susceptible to debunking. This was something else entirely: not only could it not be disproven, it seemed to vaporise the very idea of proof.

Some time ago, I came across a Russian manual called Information-Psychological War Operations: A Short Encyclopaedia and Reference Guide (the 2011 edition, credited to Veprintsev et al and published in Moscow by Hotline-Telecom, could be purchased online for 348 roubles). The book is designed for ‘students, political technologists, state security services and civil servants’ – a kind of user’s manual for junior information warriors. The deployment of information weapons, it suggests, ‘acts like an invisible radiation’ upon its targets: ‘the population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon so the state doesn’t switch on its selfdefence mechanisms.’ If regular war is about guns and missiles, the encyclopaedia continues, ‘information war is supple, you can never predict the angle or instruments of an attack’.

The 495-page encyclopaedia contained an introduction to information-psychological war, a glossary of key terms and detailed flowcharts describing the methods and strategies of defensive and offensive operations, including ‘operational deception’ (maskirovka), ‘programmaticalmathematical influence’, ‘disinformation’, ‘imitation’, and ‘TV and radio broadcasting’. In ‘normal war’ the encyclopaedia explains, ‘victory is a case of yes or no; in information war it can be partial.

Several rivals can fight over certain themes within a person’s consciousness.’

Gerasimov, could argue that it was now possible to defeat enemies through a ‘combination of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological campaigns’. This was part of a vision of war which lay not in the realm of physical contact but in what Russian theorists described as the ‘psychosphere’.

These wars of the future would be fought not on the battlefield but in the minds of men.

Disinformation and psychological operations are as old as the Trojan horse. But what distinguished the Kremlin’s approach from that of its Western rivals was this new stress on the ‘psychosphere’

‘THIS WAS SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY: NOT ONLY COULD IT NOT BE DISPROVEN, IT SEEMED TO VAPORISE THE VERY IDEA OF PROOF’ I had imagined the phrase ‘information war’ referred to some sort of geopolitical debate, with Russian propagandists on one side and Western propagandists on the other, both trying to convince everyone in the middle that their side was right.

But the encyclopaedia suggested something more expansive: information war was less about methods of persuasion and more about ‘influencing social relations’ and ‘control over the sources of strategic reserves’. Invisible weapons acting like radiation to override biological responses and seize strategic reserves? The text seemed more like garbled science fiction than a guide for students and civil servants.

But after studying recent Russian military theory – in history books and journals – the strange language of the encyclopaedia made more sense. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia had been preoccupied with the need to match the capabilities of the US and its allies. In 1999, Marshal Igor Sergeev, then Minister of Defence, admitted that Russia could not compete militarily with the West. Instead, he suggested, it needed to search for ‘revolutionary paths’ and ‘asymmetrical directions’. Over the course of the previous decade, Russian military and intelligence theorists had elaborated more substantial ideas for non-physical warfare – claiming that Russia was already under attack by western NGOs and media.

By 2013 the head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Valery

as the theatre of conflict. The operation was no longer auxiliary to some physical struggle or military invasion: it had become an end in itself. Indeed, as the Russian encyclopaedia for its practitioners concluded: ‘Information war… is in many places replacing standard war.’

The idea was clear enough. But what could ‘invisible radiation’ really achieve? Was it simply an attempt to put a hard edge on what the Americans call ‘soft power’, conducted through cultural outreach and public diplomacy? Or was it really some new form of war – one that could outfox Russia’s enemies without firing a shot?

A guiding tactical concept in the Russian information war is the idea of ‘reflexive control’.

According to Timothy L. Thomas, an analyst at the US army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, and an expert in recent Russian military history and theory, reflexive control involves ‘conveying to an opponent specially prepared information to incline him voluntarily to make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action’. In other words, to know your adversary’s behaviour patterns so well you can provoke him into doing what you want.

One well-known example from the Cold War involved the annual Red Square army parades, when the USSR would show off its nuclear weapons and ballistic rockets to the world. The Soviets knew this was one of the very few moments that Western

analysts would be able to see their arsenal, and they would plant fake nuclear weapons with exceptionally large warheads to send the West into a panic about the power and innovation of Soviet weaponry. ‘The aim,’ writes Thomas, ‘was to prompt foreign scientists, who desired to copy the advanced technology, down a dead-end street, thereby wasting precious time and money.’

In Soviet times, ‘reflexive control’ had been the subject of extensive academic study, pioneered by VA Lefebvre, a mathematical psychologist who, according to Thomas, ‘described reflexive control within the

battleground – one in which NATO no longer held a clear advantage. This has become clearer as the Kremlin appears to be trying to test the limits of the Cold War alliance, in sometimes subtle, sometimes overt ways. The semantic lock that seals the North Atlantic Treaty is Article 5, which states that a military attack on one NATO nation is an attack on all. But could you undermine this principle without firing a single bullet? Would a cyber-attack on Bulgaria by unknown actors sympathetic to Russia invoke Article 5? What about a tiny insurrection in a Baltic border town, organised by locals with suspicious ties to

‘THE ULTIMATE EFFECT, WHICH MAY BE THE INTENDED ONE, IS TO SUGGEST THAT ALL MEDIA ORGANISATIONS ARE EQUALLY UNTRUSTWORTHY’ context and logic of a reflexive game’. In the early 2000s, a biannual magazine dedicated to the subject was published by the Russian Institute of Psychology, with articles about the ‘algebra of conscience’ and ‘reflexive games between people and robots’. Applied to the landscape of information warfare, ‘reflexive control’ means that the West is kept guessing about the Kremlin’s intentions, and paralysed by inability to formulate a response to provocations whose origins and aims are impossible to determine – whose aims, in fact, may simply be to induce an overreaction.

I attended a NATO policy seminar in Kiev that was intended to address these new challenges. It was led

by Mark Laity, a former BBC defence correspondent and now head of strategic communications for NATO. Laity presented a flowchart that explained the building blocks of a narrative: how conflict leads to the desire for resolution, which is played out through ‘actions, participants and events’. It was the kind of thing students are taught at film school, or in undergraduate courses on literary theory. The presentation stressed that the world should be seen as a ‘system of stories’ inside a ‘narrative landscape’. For the attendants, mainly military men and civil servants, this was a new way of looking at the world. They took notes studiously.

NATO remains undefeated on the battlefield, but Laity wanted to make clear that the ‘narrative landscape’ represented a new and unfamiliar

Russian security services? Would all the countries in NATO go to war to keep Estonian electronic banking online?

In recent years the Kremlin seems to have sought to tease and provoke its Western neighbours by more conventional means as well (Russia insists the reverse is true). Incursions into European airspace by Russian planes have become regular events, as have Russian naval incursions into European territorial waters.

These manoeuvres put NATO in a double bind. Not reacting would show the organisation to be pointless.

But, on the other hand, the Kremlin knows perfectly well that NATO has to respond. What if it does not take more than that to make NATO look impotent? And if the battle shifts to the ‘psychosphere’, NATO’s military supremacy becomes irrelevant – indeed it becomes an Achilles heel as the alliance’s might makes it more unwieldy and renders its subversion more dramatic.

RT is Russia’s state-run international news channel, and RT America began broadcasting in 2010, promising an alternative view to the American mainstream media. The channel is funded by the Kremlin with services in English, German, Spanish and Arabic. RT claims to have a ‘global reach’ of 700 million people, and says its video clips have received over 2bn views online, making it ‘YouTube’s leading news provider’.

The mantra of Margarita Simonyan, who heads RT, is: ‘There is no such thing as objective reporting.’

THE DAVID KING COLLECTION

Throughout the run of Describe the Night, a selection of banners from the world’s largest Soviet art and design collection, The David King Collection, will be on display in Hampstead’s foyer. More information is available in the foyer. #HTDescribetheNight

30 APRIL – 9 JUNE HAMPSTEAD THEATRE’S FOYER These banners are part of the David King Collection. Purchased from David King by Tate Archive 2016. Photo © Tate, London 2018.

At a time when many in the West have lost faith in the integrity and authority of mainstream media organisations, RT seems dedicated to the proposition that, after the notion of objectivity has evaporated, all stories are equally true. In America, where polls show that trust in the media has never recovered to levels seen before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, RT’s posters showed George W Bush celebrating ‘Mission Accomplished’ – with the tag line: ‘This is what happens when there is no second opinion.’ The posters, however, do not offer any argument for trusting Putin’s TV network; their main message is that you cannot trust the Western media. It is all too easy to show that RT’s coverage is rife with conspiracy theories and risible fabrications: one programme showed fake documents intended to prove that the US was guiding the Ukrainian government to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers from Western Ukraine. Another RT report investigated whether the CIA had invented Ebola to use as a weapon against developing nations.

Presenters rarely challenge the views of ‘experts’ during discussions: discussing the Syrian civil war, one regular guest suggested that it was ‘planned in 1997

by Paul Wolfowitz’, while another described the death toll as ‘a joint production of CIA, MI6, Mossad’.

The foibles of RT have been well-documented,

but journalistic credibility is not what the network is striving for. If a commitment to the impossibility of objective reporting means that any position, however bizarre, is no better or worse than any other, the ultimate effect, which may be the intended one, is to suggest that all media organisations are equally untrustworthy – and to elevate journalistic errors by the BBC or New York Times into indisputable signs they are lackeys of their governments.

The conspiratorial flights of fancy that fill RT’s airtime are reminiscent of ‘active measures’, the oldschool KGB PSYOPs tactics that the Soviet defector Oleg Kalugin described as ‘the heart and soul of the intelligence services’. Departments dedicated to active measures did not seek to collect intelligence. Their aim, said Kalugin, was ‘subversion: to drive wedges into the Western community, particularly NATO, and weaken the United States’. A favourite tactic was to place fake stories, ‘dezinformatsiya’, in international news outlets. One story from the early 1980s presented painstakingly concocted medical proof that the CIA invented Aids to kill off the AfricanAmerican population.

Where once the KGB would have spent months, or years, carefully planting well-made forgeries through covert agents in the West, the new dezinformatsiya

Voroshilov, Molotov, Stalin & Yezhov, April 1937. An altered version of this photo with Yezhov erased was released in 1940.

is cheap, crass and quick: created in a few seconds and thrown online. The aim seems less to establish alternative truths than to spread confusion about the status of truth. In a similar vein, the aim of the professional pro-Putin online trolls who haunt website comment sections is to make any constructive conversation impossible. At one ‘troll factory’ in St Petersburg, employees are paid about £500 a month to pose as regular internet users defending Putin, posting insulting pictures of foreign leaders, and spreading conspiracy theories.

Taken together, all these efforts constitute a kind of linguistic sabotage of the infrastructure of reason:

war, the encyclopaedia states. The first approach ‘recognises the primacy of objects in the real world’ and attempts to spin them in a favourable or unfavourable direction. The ‘more strategic’ approach, it continues, ‘puts information before objects’. In other words, the encyclopaedia seems to be saying that reality can be reinvented. Thus, in information-psychological war there are no clear victories, no flags to be planted, no borders to be redrawn, only endless mind games in the ‘psychosphere’ where victory might be the opposite of what you initially supposed. Is the purpose of RT, for example, to spread news, conspiracies and

‘ – RUSSIA’S STATE-RUN INTERNATIONAL NEWS CHANNEL ‘RT – SEEMS DEDICATED TO THE PROPOSITION THAT, AFTER THE NOTION OF OBJECTIVITY HAS EVAPORATED, ALL STORIES ARE EQUALLY TRUE.’ if the very possibility of rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no grounds for debate – and the public can be expected to decide that there is no point in trying to decide the winner, or even bothering to listen.

The mindset that the Kremlin’s information warfare seems intended to encourage is well-suited to European citizens at this particular moment. Some 20% of the members of the European parliament now belong to parties – largely on the far right – sympathetic to Moscow. The significance of these parties has grown alongside the decline of trust in national governments. At moments of financial and geopolitical uncertainty, people turn to outlandish theories to explain crises. Is this the ‘invisible radiation’ that the Russian information-psychological war encyclopaedia had referred to? Once the idea of rational discourse has been undermined, spectacle is all that remains. The side that tells better stories, and does so more aggressively – unencumbered by scrupulousness about their verifiability – will edge out someone trying methodically to ‘prove’ a fact.

There are two possible approaches to information

opinions? Or is its purpose to project an impression of Russian strength and confidence – which means that talking constantly about its brazen attitude only augments that perception?

I sometimes wonder whether the very idea of information-psychological war – with its suggestion that Russia had discovered a shadowy weapon for which the West has no answer – is itself a species of information warfare. Perhaps the encyclopaedia, and talk of ‘invisible radiation’ that could override ‘biological defences’, is simply one more bluff – like the fake nuclear weapons that were paraded through Red Square to lead overeager western analysts into a hall of mirrors. And if this is simply a 21st-century update of that classic example of ‘reflexive control’ – inducing your enemy to do what you want him to – then, is this essay, the one you are reading, part of the plan?

Peter Pomerantsev is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: the Surreal Heart of the New Russia.

REBBECCA O’MARA & DAVID BIRRELL

SIENA KELLY STEVE JOHN SHEPHERD & BEN CAPLAN

TRUE LIVES ISAAC EMMANUILOVICH BABEL Born in Odessa on 13 July 1894 to middle class Jewish parents. Babel met Maxim Gorky in 1916, and their friendship became a major force in Babel’s life. Gorky, a particular favourite of Stalin, edited The Chronicle in which he began to include Babel’s writing; as a result, Babel was invited to contribute fiction and journalism to other journals and newspapers. He joined the Red Cavalry in 1917, serving on the Romanian front, in Petrograd, and later in the 1920 Soviet-Polish war; his 1920 diary survives and he wrote pieces about his military experiences for New Life.

After leaving the army, he worked for newspapers and dedicated more time to writing. In 1925, he

YEVGENIA SOLOMONOVNA FEIGENBURG Born in 1904 to a Jewish family in Gomel. She married young, twice. Her second husband, the diplomat Alexi

published The Story of My Dovecote, a volume of short stories inspired by his childhood, but literary fame arrived with Red Cavalry (1926) a collection of stories inspired by his experiences in the Soviet-Polish War and using material from the 1920 diary. Odessa Tales (1931), another short story cycle was again praised for realism and clarity of style. During the 1930s he wrote screenplays, two plays and four novellas.

After the collapse of their marriage, Babel’s wife moved to Paris where she settled with their daughter; he lived in a common law relationship but continued an affair with Yevgenia Yezhova which had started before her marriage to NKVD chief Nicolai Yezhov. In spite of this Yezhov and Babel were friends.

As the 1930s progressed, Babel’s relationship with the Soviet authorities deteriorated. He travelled frequently to France (to visit his wife and daughter), wrote less and became increasingly isolated. His greatest ally, Gorky, died in 1936. He was arrested by the NKVD in May 1939 and was charged with belonging to anti-Soviet organisations, and spying for France and Austria. The NKVD confiscated 15 manuscript folders, 11 notebooks and 7 notepads all of which are presumed destroyed. Though Babel appealed against the charges and tried to revoke testimony given under torture, he was executed on 27 January 1940. He became a ‘nonperson’ in the Soviet Union and was only rehabilitated in 1953.

Fyodorovich Gadun, was posted to the Soviet Embassy in London. She travelled with him to England, but stayed abroad when he was recalled to Russia, working as a typist in the Soviet legation in Berlin. There in 1927 she met Isaac Babel, whose work she admired, and started an affair with him. She returned to Russia, and in 1930 met Yezhov, who was also married, at a sanatorium in Sukhumi. They were married by the end of the year.

Lively, irrepressible, flighty and glamourous, Yevgenia was as promiscuous as her third husband.

The couple lived luxuriously amongst the Soviet elite in a dacha in Meshcherino with a private cinema, tennis courts and a large staff; they adopted a daughter, Natasha, from a children’s home. A regular guest at Kremlin receptions, Yevgenia established her own artistic salon entertaining figures such as Babel,

the actor Solomon Mikhoels, jazz-band leader Leonid Utesov, film director Sergei Eisenstein, journalist Mikhail Koltsov and novelist Mikhail Sholokhov.

Stalin was an admirer of Sholokhov’s work, and he was displeased by news of his affair with Yevgenia.

As 1938 wore on and Yezhov’s political position became increasingly dangerous, Yevgenia came under extreme pressure and her fears for her family started to make her unwell. In September Yezhov learned that Beria was planning to discredit him by claiming Yevgenia was working for British intelligence; he sought a divorce to protect her.

Desperate, Yevgenia suffered a complete

NIKOLAI IVANOVICH YEZHOV Born to poor parents in St. Petersburg in May 1895.

After primary education he became a factory worker, but in 1915 joined the Russian Army and saw action on the Eastern Front. Joining the Communist Party in 1917, he became a political commissar in the Red Army during the Civil War (he did not serve in the Soviet-Polish war) and then rose through several political posts, becoming a functionary for the Central Committee in Moscow by 1927.

Under five-foot tall (nicknamed ‘The Poison Dwarf’), Yeshov was a man of excesses. Promiscuous (and probably bisexual) he was an obsessively hard working, hard drinking depressive, plagued by ill health. But he was one of Stalin’s favourites and he and his glamorous second wife Yevgenia were members of the Kremlin inner circle.

breakdown. Diagnosed with an ‘asthenic-depressive condition’, she was admitted to a sanatorium near Moscow. From there she wrote to Stalin begging for clemency; Stalin did not reply. Dreading interrogation by the NKVD she wrote to Yezhov, asking him to provide poison and suggesting that he send an agreed signal when her arrest was imminent. He sent her Luminal, and a little later sent the signal (the statuette of a dwarf). She took the Luminal, dying two days later on 21 November 1938. In spite of her efforts, her nine-year old daughter was ultimately sent to a state orphanage.

In 1933 he became a member of a newly established Central Purge Commission which ejected over 1 million Communist Party members. In 1934 he became a full member of the Central Committee, then Chairman of the Party Control Commission.

In September 1936 he became head of the NKVD, and in January 1937 General Commissar of State Security. In these roles he initiated the Great Purge (‘Yezhovshchina’) which ruthlessly eliminated Stalin’s ‘enemies’, reaching its height during 1937 – 38. Over 1.3 million were arrested and 682,000 shot for ‘crimes against the state’ (often to meet arbitrary quotas set by Yezhov). The Gulag population tripled in size with 140,000 prisoners dying in the camps. Yezhov personally tortured important suspects and carried out many executions himself.

By the summer of 1938, having served his purpose, Yezhov had himself become the object of Stalin’s ‘suspicions’. In September, learning that his wife was to be accused of being an English spy, he divorced her to forestall her arrest. Two months later, at her request, he provided her with the Luminal she took to commit suicide. In December, Beria replaced him as head of the NKVD. Yezhov was arrested in April 1939; under interrogation he implicated many of his family and friends (including Babel) for supposed counterrevolutionary activities, hundreds of whom were killed. Fears of NKVD loyalty to Yezhov meant his execution in February 1940 was strictly secret; accordingly, rumours of his survival circulated for some time.

VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH PUTIN Born 7 October 1952 in St Petersburg (then Leningrad).

His parents were in their 40s when he was born (hence the rumours that he was adopted – see below) having earlier lost two sons – one in infancy before the war and the other of diphtheria during the siege of Leningrad seven years earlier. His father was a former NKVD officer who was seriously wounded during the siege, his mother was a factory worker.

Putin is unusual amongst world leaders in that virtually nothing is known of his early life, and what is known exists only as dictated by him. This is because of his early obscurity and the unexpected nature of his rise to power: in the run up to his first presidential election, his backers commissioned three journalists to work with him to create an official biography in three weeks.

Brought up in poverty but spoilt by his parents, Vovka, Vova or Volodya to his friends, paints himself as a wild youth. As a young teenager, however, he started training in martial arts, took an elective course in German (which he speaks fluently though with a heavy accent), and, at the age of 16, he tried to join the KGB. They advised him to attend law college and, in spite of fairly undistinguished academic results, he gained admission to Leningrad university’s prestigious law department. He was recruited into the KGB at the end of his fourth year in 1975. After initial training, he worked in low-grade counterintelligence and intelligence roles in Leningrad.

He married in 1983 and his first daughter was born in 1985. In the same year, having risen to the rank of Major, he was sent for training to Moscow and was subsequently posted to Dresden. He had hoped for a posting in West Germany; Dresden was an intelligence backwater and his role in the illegal intelligence-gathering unit was unfulfilling. His family settled into a contented life amongst KGB and Stasi officers and their families; he put on three stone and his second daughter was born in 1986. As East Germany collapsed in 1990 he and his family returned to Leningrad.

It is strangely unclear when Putin left the KGB; there are contradictory versions of events, and, in any case, he would have probably have become part of the KGB’s ‘active reserve’ on leaving. Once home, he was recruited by Leningrad university as Assistant

Chancellor of Foreign Relations (very few Russians having any international experience at the time). From there he was quickly recruited by Anatoly Sobchak, a lawyer whose lectures Putin had once attended, who had become Chairman of Leningrad city council and was later to be Mayor. There are differing accounts about how the appointment happened, but this was his first step into politics. Between 1990 and 1996 he held various senior posts in the Leningrad/ St Petersburg administration, culminating in his nomination as Deputy Mayor. When Sobchak lost his bid for re-election Putin was summoned to Moscow to work for central government.

In 1997, Boris Yeltsin appointed him to the presidential staff, and, despite his low rank in the KGB reserve, Putin became Director of the FSB (the successor to the KGB) in 1998. At this point Yeltsin was profoundly unpopular: Russia had seen hyperinflation, rampant corruption and economic and social inequality on an unprecedented scale. With all the promise of the early 1990s dashed and his term coming to an end, Yeltsin feared prosecution of himself and his family by his successor (such legal action would have boosted the popularity of any incoming president). He needed the next president to be somebody he could trust.

Yeltsin’s inner circle lighted on Putin surprisingly quickly: Boris Berezovsky knew him from St Petersburg and had visited him often at the FSB in Moscow (their meetings would take place in a disused lift shaft because Putin believed the whole building to be bugged). He suggested his candidature, as a proven loyalist, to Yeltsin. The idea was seized upon in spite of the fact that none of the decision-makers actually knew very much about Putin; thus, in August 1999, Yeltsin named him Prime Minister of Russia.

On 31 December 1999, when Yeltsin resigned unexpectedly, Putin became acting President, giving him an ideal platform to run for election. In March 2000 he duly won the election at the first round with 53% of the vote; his inauguration took place in May. His first presidential decree guaranteed Yeltsin immunity from prosecution.

Since then he has served three terms as President and one as Prime Minister (the latter to circumvent the Russian constitution’s limiting the President to

a maximum of two consecutive terms). He was re-elected in the first round of this year’s election on 18 March 2018 with 77% of the vote.

Under Putin's leadership, Russia has enjoyed social stability and economic growth and the president has enjoyed high domestic approval ratings throughout his term in office (mostly higher than 70%). But the country’s brief flirtation with Western-style democracy has been abandoned and experts and political analysts no longer consider Russia a democracy.

Opposition political parties only exist with government consent and full state control of the media has been effected with companies being brought back into the public sector by various means.

Russia ranks 131st (alongside Kazakhstan) in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index 2012 – 16 (the UK is ranked 10 th). In the 2018 Freedom House ‘Freedom in the World’ Index, which sets out to measure the citizen’s civil liberties and political rights, Russia has an identical score to Libya.

Now profoundly authoritarian, Russia is continually accused of human rights violations, of conducting crackdowns on civil dissent and opposition, as well as of ordering assassinations of critics and opponents of the president and his regime both at home and abroad.

Officials of the United States government have accused Russia of leading a programme of interference in support of Donald Trump during the U.S. presidential election of 2016. It is likely this forms part of a much broader misinformation war.

Vladimir Putin, 1991

THE PUTINA CONTROVERSY Vera Putina, born 6 September 1926 has, since 1999 when she first saw him on television, insisted that Vladimir Putin is her ‘lost’ son. Putina, from Metekhi in Georgia, says that Putin's father was a married Russian mechanic named Platon Privalov with whom she had an affair in 1950 (her son, whom she calls Vova, was born exactly two years before Putin’s official birthdate). A ‘Vladimir Putin’ was certainly registered at Metekhi school in 1959 – 1960.

Putina subsequently married a Georgian soldier, Giorgi Osepahvili, who persuaded her to abandon the

illegitimate boy; in December 1960 she delivered Vova to her parents in Russia. Putina claims that Putin’s ‘official’ St. Petersburg-based parents must have adopted her son from his grandparents to whom they were presumably related. Putina had heard that her son had joined the KGB and says, though she is prepared to submit to DNA tests, that she has been under pressure to remain silent (a school teacher who taught the boy makes the same claim). The Kremlin dismisses the whole story as an attempt to discredit the President.

SIENA KELLY & STEVE JOHN SHEPHERD WENDY KWEH

JOEL MACCORMACK BEN CAPLAN

RAJIV JOSEPH WRITER

Rajiv Joseph’s play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama and was also awarded a grant for Outstanding New American Play by the National Endowment for the Arts. His play Guards at the Taj was a 2016 Obie Winner for Best New American Play and a 2016 Lucille Lortel Winner for Best Play. His play Archduke received its World Premiere last spring at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Other plays include Gruesome Playground Injuries; The Monster at the Door; Animals out of Paper; The Lake Effect; The North Pool; Mr. Wolf and Describe the Night.

Rajiv has been awarded artistic grants from the Whiting Foundation, United States Artists and the Harold & Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust. He is a board member of the Lark Play Development Center in New York City, where he develops all his plays.

He served for three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal and now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

LISA SPIRLING DIRECTOR

Lisa is the Artistic Director of Theatre503.

Previous work at Hampstead Theatre includes Deposit; Ken (also The Bunker); Pine; Fault Lines and I Know How I Feel About Eve. Other theatre work includes In Event of Moone Disaster (Theatre503); Jumpy (Theatr Clwyd); Hello/ Goodbye (Singapore Rep Theatre); The Nine O’Clock Slot (Ice & Fire Theatre Company/Red Gallery); Donkeys’ Years and Here (both Rose, Kingston); Enron (West End Recast/UK tour); Boeing Boeing (Alley Theatre, Texas); Idiots of Ants (Pleasance, Edinburgh/Arts); Hundreds & Thousands (Buckle For Dust/ETT/Soho) and Cotton Wool (Theatre503).

CAST IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER DAVID BIRRELL

NIKOLAI

BEN CAPLAN

ISAAC BABEL

SIENA KELLY

URZULA

WENDY KWEH

MARIYA/MRS PETROVNA

JOEL MACCORMACK

FELIKS

REBECCA O’MARA

YEVGENIA VOVA

STEVE JOHN SHEPHERD

CREATIVE TEAM RAJIV JOSEPH

WRITER DIRECTOR

LISA SPIRLING

DESIGNER

POLLY SULLIVAN

LIGHTING DESIGNER

JOHANNA TOWN

COMPOSER & SOUND DESIGNER

RICHARD HAMMARTON CHI-SAN HOWARD

MOVEMENT DIRECTOR CASTING DIRECTOR

ANNELIE POWELL CDG ROXY COOK

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR

LUKE CHILD

PRODUCTION MANAGER COMPANY STAGE MANAGER

CLAIRE SIBLEY

COMPANY STAGE MANAGER

JONATHAN GOSLING LORNA SEYMOUR

DEPUTY STAGE MANAGER

BETHANY COTTON

ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER

AIDA BOURDIS

STAGE MANAGEMENT PLACEMENT

LISA AITKEN

COSTUME SUPERVISOR

TORI HITCHENS

WARDROBE MANAGER

THE SCENERY SHOP

SET BUILDERS

ELLIOT DAWES

PROP MAKER

MARC BRENNER

REHEARSAL PHOTOGRAPHER WITH VERY SPECIAL THANKS TO JANET BIRD

HAMPSTEAD THEATRE WOULD LIKE TO THANK ANGELS THE COSTUMIERS MATT GEORGE, THE BIG WIG COMPANY ELLIOT SQUIRE THE ALMEIDA THEATRE THE DONMAR WAREHOUSE PAUL WANKLIN

FOR EXCLUSIVE INFORMATION, NEWS & COMPETITIONS @Hamps_Theatre #HTDescribeTheNight

hampsteadtheatre

MAKE UP PROVIDED BY DESCRIBE THE NIGHT was commissioned by and the World Premiere was produced by the Alley Theatre, Houston, TX, Gregory Boyd, Artistic Director, Dean R. Gladden, Managing Director.

New York Premiere Presented By Atlantic Theater Company, New York City, 2017 DESCRIBE THE NIGHT was first presented in 2014 in a student production at New York University’s Graduate Acting Program, Mark Wing-Davey, Chair.

DESCRIBE THE NIGHT was developed at TheatreWorks, Palo Alto, CA, as part of their New Works Festival.

CAST & CREATIVE TEAM DAVID BIRRELL NIKOLAI Theatre work includes The Shadow Factory (NST City, Southampton); The Threepenny Opera; Talking Heads and Educating Rita (all Bolton Octagon/ Derby Theatre); The Wind in the Willows (Original Cast UK Tour); The War Has Not Yet Started (Theatre Royal Plymouth); An Enemy of the People (Bolton Octagon – Best Supporting Actor Manchester Theatre Awards); The Family Way; Journey’s End (Bolton Octagon – Best Supporting Actor Manchester Theatre Awards); The Death of King Arthur (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse); Peter Pan; A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ragtime (all Regent’s Park); The Last Days of Troy (Royal Exchange/Shakespeare’s Globe); Sweeney Todd (West Yorkshire Playhouse/Royal Exchange – Best Actor Nominee Manchester Theatre Awards, Best Performance in a Musical Nominee Theatre Awards UK); A Little Night Music (Guildford/West End); Company (Sheffield Crucible); Passion and Grand Hotel (both Donmar); The Secret Garden; Hapgood and Peter Pan (all Birmingham Rep/West Yorkshire Playhouse); The Real Thing (Salisbury Playhouse); Spamalot (Original West End Cast); Henry V (Propeller); Oh! What A Lovely War (National Theatre); The Venetian Twins; Love’s Labour’s Lost; Moby Dick; The Tempest; Murder in the Cathedral; Hamlet; Columbus and Romeo and Juliet (all RSC).

Television and Film work includes Holy Flying Circus; Midsomer Murders; Buried and Angels.

BEN CAPLAN ISAAC BABEL Ben trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Theatre work includes The Knowledge (Charing Cross); Abigail’s Party (Theatre Royal, Bath/UK tour); Sunny Afternoon (Hampstead Theatre/West End); Hedda Gabler (Salisbury Playhouse); Shiver (Watford Palace); Playing With Grown Ups (Theatre503); The Winter’s Tale and Dr. Korzcak’s Example (both Unicorn); Titanic (The MAC, Belfast); Seven Jewish Children (Royal Court); The Common Pursuit (Menier Chocolate Factory); Three Sisters on Hope Street (Liverpool Everyman/ Hampstead Theatre); Two Thousand Years (National Theatre); The Man of the Future is Dead (Edinburgh);

Hamlet (Southampton Nuffield); The Dwarfs (Tricycle); As You Like It (Oxford Playhouse) and SWEAT (Bloomsbury).

Film work includes The Harness; The Commuter; That Woman; The Funeral; Leap Year and Rocknrolla.

Television work includes Midsomer Murders; Maigret; Call the Midwife (series regular 1 – 6); X Company; The Coroner; New Blood; The Lost Honour of Christopher Jeffries; Whitechapel (series 3); Dark Matters; The Runaway; Trinity; The Passion; Maxwell; The Candidate; Judge John Deed; Dwarfs; Band of Brothers; A Touch of Frost; The Perfect Blue; Soldier Soldier; Inspector Morse and Where the Heart Is. Radio work includes The Archers; Before the Fact and Kicking the Air.

SIENA KELLY URZULA Theatre work includes A Christmas Carol (Old Vic); On the Town (Regent’s Park); King Kong the Musical (workshop); Little Red Riding Hood (National Youth Ballet); Water Babies: The Musical (Curve, Leicester); Bugsy Malone (Workshop – The Lyric); West Side Story and 13 The Musical (both National Youth Music Theatre).

Television work includes Vanity Fair.

WENDY KWEH MARIYA/MRS PETROVNA Wendy trained at RADA. Theatre work includes Julius Caesar (The Bridge); Snow in Midsummer (RSC); The Sugar Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie (HighTide Festival); Boy (Almeida); You For Me For You (Royal Court); Image of an Unknown Young Woman( Gate); Chimerica (West End); Moonwalking in Chinatown (Soho) and The Oresteia (National Theatre).

Film work includes Hot Hot Hot and The Blue Mansion.

Television work includes Silent Witness; Apocalypse Slough; EastEnders; Holby City; Coronation Street; Casualty; Murder City; The Year of the Tiger; The Crooked Man; The Bill and Doctors.

Radio work includes Lights, Camera, Kidnap!; Demolition Man; Words and Music; Bare Branches; Boom and Westway.

JOEL MACCORMACK FELIKS Joel trained at RADA. Theatre work includes The Oresteia (Shakespeare’s Globe – Ian Charleson Commendation); Measure For Measure (Shakespeare’s Globe); Each His Own Wilderness (Orange Tree – UK Theatre Award For Best Performance In A Play 2015); Oppenheimer and The Shoemaker’s Holiday (both RSC).

Television work includes Safe House and Wolf Hall.

Film work includes Ready Player One. Radio work includes Homefront; Richard II; Alexander I and The Rules of Palship.

REBECCA O’MARA YEVGENIA Rebecca trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Theatre work includes Melt (Rough Magic); Private Lives (Gate); Helen and I (Druid); Othello (Abbey); Chekhov’s First Play (Dead Centre); Wuthering Heights (Gate); The Aristocrats (Abbey); The Vortex; Pride and Prejudice; Mrs Warren’s Profession and Hay Fever (all Gate, Dublin); Moment (Bush); Danton’s Death (National Theatre); The Yalta Game (Gate, Dublin/Edinburgh International Festival); Far from the Madding Crowd (ETT); Deep Blue Sea (Theatre Royal, Bath/ Vaudeville); Salt Meets Wound (Theatre503); For Services Rendered; Flight Without End; Mathilde; 4:48 Psychosis; The Duchess of Malfi; Anatol; The Cherry

Orchard; Enemy of the People; Oleanna; Macbeth and The Way of the World (all LAMDA).

Film work includes Jimmy’s Hall.

Television work includes Red Rock; Line of Duty; The History of Mr Polly and Doctors.

STEVE JOHN SHEPHERD VOVA Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare’s Globe); Plastic (Theatre Royal, Bath); The Good Canary (Rose, Kingston); A View From Islington North (Out of Joint); Bomber’s Moon (Trafalgar Studios/Park Theatre); Albion (Bush); Piaf (Donmar/ Vaudeville); The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder and Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads (both National Theatre); Original Sin (Sheffield Crucible); Twelfth Night (UK tour) and Dangerous Corner (West Yorkshire Playhouse/Garrick).

Film work includes Entebbe; Romance; The Best Man; Too Much Too Young; Boudicca; Spy Hole; Star Wars Episode II; Now You See Her; Me Without You; From Hell; Greenwich Mean Time; Virtual Sexuality; RPM and I Want You. Television work includes Silent Witness; Waking the Dead; Lunch Monkeys (series 1 & 2); Taggart; Bringing Down the House; Being Human; Material Girl; Plus One; Cold Blood; Bad Mother’s Handbook; Bonkers; Dalziel and Pascoe; New Tricks; Last Chancers; Real Men; Spine Chillers; The Knock; Forgive and Forget; An Unsuitable Job for a Woman; Maisie Raine (series 1 & 2); This Life (series 1 & 2); The One That Got Away; Christmas and On Expenses.

BEN CAPLAN, JOEL MACCORMACK, REBECCA O’MARA, DAVID BIRRELL, WENDY KWEH, SIENA KELLY & STEVE JOHN SHEPHERD

POLLY SULLIVAN DESIGNER Design work includes Trouble In Mind (The Print Room); The Mentor (Vaudeville); Firebird (Trafalgar Studios); The Roundabout (59e59 NYC); The Cherry Orchard (GSMD); Deposit; Diminished; Scarlett; Experience; Alligators; Pine; Firebird; Elephants; Fault Lines; I Know How I Feel About Eve and Matchbox Theatre (all Hampstead Theatre); The Mentor; Trouble in Mind; Forever Yours, Marie-Lou; The One That Got Away and Monsieur Popular (all Ustinov Studio Theatre Royal, Bath); Educating Rita (Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch); The Roundabout; Deny, Deny, Deny and Hamlet (all Park Theatre); Scarlett and Jumpy (both Theatr Clwyd); The Snow Dragon (St James’s/tour); Here and Donkeys’ Years (both Rose, Kingston); The Bomb – First Blast: Proliferation (1940 – 1992); The Bomb – Second Blast: Present Dangers (1992 – 2012); The Riots; A Walk in the Woods; Tactical Questioning; Called to Account and How Long Is Never? (all Tricycle Theatre); Flight Path (Bush); Hundreds & Thousands and The Snow Dragon (both Soho); Aung San Suu Kyi – The Lady of Burma (Riverside Studios); Bear Stories (Polka Theatre); Cotton Wool; The Atheist and Years of Sunlight (all Theatre503).

JOHANNA TOWN LIGHTING DESIGNER Work at Hampstead Theatre includes Experience and Deposit.

Other theatre work includes Dear Lupin; Fences; What the Butler Saw; Some Like It Hip Hop; Betrayal; Speaking in Tongues and Beautiful Thing (all West End); Rose (National Theatre/Broadway); My Name is Rachel Corrie (Royal Court/West End/NY); Guantanamo (NY/ Tricycle/West End); Arabian Nights and Our Lady of Sligo (both NY); Haunted (Royal Exchange/NY); The Steward of Christendom (Out of Joint/Broadway); Macbeth; The Permanent Way and Our Country’s Good (Out of Joint/World tour); Don Quixote and The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes (both RSC); Frankenstein; Guys and Dolls; The House of Bernarda Alba and King Lear (all Manchester Royal Exchange); A Mad World My Masters (ETT/RSC); Arcadia and Tonight at 8.30 (both ETT); Moon on a Rainbow Shawl and All My Sons (both Talawa); The Norman Conquests; FRACKED!; Educating Rita and The Deep Blue Sea/Rattigan’s Nijinsky (all Chichester Festival Theatre); Remarkable Invisible

and Miss Julie (both Theatre by the Lake); Brainstorm (National Theatre/Park Theatre); Medea and Romeo and Juliet (both Headlong); Julius Caesar; The Nap and That Face (all Sheffield Theatres).

Johanna is a Fellow of GSMD, Associate Artist for Theatre503 and The Chair of the Association of Lighting Designers.

RICHARD HAMMARTON COMPOSER & SOUND DESIGNER Theatre work includes The Weir (ETT); Love From a Stranger (Royal & Derngate/Fiery Angel); Linda (Royal Court); Dr Faustus (Winner of MEN Best Design Award); The Crucible; Brilliant Adventures and Edward II (all Manchester Royal Exchange); The Crucible (Old Vic); Kingston 14 (Theatre Royal, Stratford East); A Number (Nuffield Theatre/Young Vic); The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare’s Globe); Ghosts (Duchess); Pride and Prejudice (Theatre Royal Bath/UK tour); Speaking in Tongues (Duke of York’s); In the Event of Moone Disaster (Theatre503, Trafalgar 1); The Mountaintop (Theatre503, Trafalgar 1 – Winner of Olivier for Best New Play); Girls (HighTide); Burning Doors (Belarus Free Theatre); Low Level Panic (Orange Tree); Ghost from a Perfect Place and The Pitchfork Disney (both Arcola).

Television work includes Agatha Christie’s Marple; No Win No Fee; Sex ‘n’ Death; Wipeout and The Ship.

Radio work includes The Effect.

Orchestration work includes Agatha Christie’s Marple (series 1 & 2); Primeval; Jericho; If I Had You; Ripper Street; Dracula; A History of Britain; Silent Witness; Dalziel and Pascoe; Alice Through the Looking Glass; The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz and Scenes of a Sexual Nature.

CHI-SAN HOWARD MOVEMENT DIRECTOR Trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Theatre work as Movement Director includes Parade (Mountview); NeverLand (Guild of Misrule/ Site specific); Love and Money and Pornography (both ALRA); In Event of Moone Disaster (Theatre503); Tenderly (New Wimbledon Theatre Studio); Cosmic Scallies (Royal Exchange Manchester/Graeae); Children of the Night (Oxford Playhouse/Oxford Arts Festival); These Trees Are Made of Blood (Arcola); Moth (Hope Mill Theatre); Every You Every Me (Oxford

Playhouse); The Tempest (Southwark Playhouse); Adding Machine: A Musical (Finborough Theatre); Narcissus (RCSSD/Minack Theatre); Scarlet (Southwark Playhouse); The Best Pies in London (Youaremine/RIFT Shakespeare in Shoreditch Festival); Schumpeter’s Gale (Rose, Kingston); Antigone (Belt Up Theatre/UK tour) and Lorca is Dead (Belt Up Theatre/Southwark Playhouse).

Theatre work as Associate Movement Director includes Deposit and Occupational Hazards (both Hampstead Theatre).

Theatre work as Assistant Movement Director includes Great Expectations (West Yorkshire Playhouse) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Welsh National Opera/West Yorkshire Playhouse).

Film work as Movement Director includes Birds of Paradise.

ANNELIE POWELL CDG CASTING DIRECTOR Annelie is Head of Casting at Nuffield Theatre Southampton and a freelance Casting Director. She was formerly Assistant Casting Director at the RSC, where she cast several main house productions alongside many readings and development workshops over the 5 years she was there. She is a full member

of the Casting Directors Guild.

Recent credits include Imperium; A Streetcar Named Desire; Hamlet; Macbeth (Children’s Casting); King Lear; The Shadow Factory; In the Event of Moone Disaster and Fantastic Mr Fox.

ROXY COOK ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Roxy trained in directing at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts.

Recent work as a Director includes Dirty Little Machine and The Quantum Physics of My Heart (both VAULT Festival) and the world premiere of Happy to Help (Park Theatre).

Other work as Associate Director includes Rotterdam (Arts Theatre, 59e59/Trafalgar Studios/ Theatre503 – winner of an Olivier Award for outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre) and Quaint Honour (Finborough).

In 2017, Roxy assisted Rob Drummond on The Majority (National Theatre).

She is staff Director for West End in Schools, workshop facilitator for Highgate Youth Theatre and runs Zut Alors Theatre.

WENDY KWEH & JOEL MACCORMACK

HAMPSTEAD THEATRE IN 2017/18 PUBLIC DEMAND 15 HOUSE PRODUCED PRODUCTIONS 9 WORLD PREMIERES 2 UK PREMIERES 90% CAPACITY ACROSS MAIN STAGE AND DOWNSTAIRS £2,697,500 AT THE BOX OFFICE 123,055 TICKETS SOLD 5,000 MORE THAN PREVIOUS YEAR 6,000 NEW BOOKERS 40% MORE THAN PREVIOUS YEAR 611 PERFORMANCES

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BEYOND NW3

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THE HISTORY OF HAMPSTEAD THEATRE Hampstead Theatre was founded in 1959 by James Roose Evans and was initially based in a church hall in Hampstead Village. New plays formed the core of the repertory from the very beginning and the first season included successful premieres of Pinter’s The Room and The Dumb Waiter. In 1962 the theatre moved to the 157 seat prefabricated building at Swiss Cottage which was to be its home for over 40 years. The programme mix was much the same as it is now: occasional revivals (a 1963 production of Private Lives doing much to restore Noel Coward’s reputation) supporting a diverse repertory of new plays and UK premieres of American work.

During its first decade, the theatre existed without any subsidy, making it dependent on Box Office revenue, philanthropic support and revenue from transfers. Accordingly, the diverse range of Hampstead’s work developed a particular character, with intellectual challenge balanced by a significant entertainment component. This contrasted with the work of its near contemporary institution, The Royal Court, where greater financial support granted greater license for experiment. The institutions have both remained true to their heritages and Hampstead’s always close relationship with the commercial theatre has led to a surprisingly high number of West End transfers and tours.

Once established, Hampstead supported the careers of a number of notable writers. Three plays by David Hare (including his first play, Slag) premiered here; there were premieres of three plays by Michael Frayn, four plays by Mike Leigh (including Abigail’s Party), two plays by Terry Johnson, five plays by Philip Ridley, two plays by Stephen Jeffreys, and the return of Harold Pinter with the premiere of The Hothouse. Alongside these there were UK premieres of plays by Tennessee Williams (one also a World premiere), three Frank McGuinness plays, four Brian Friel plays, and plays by Athol Fugard, David Mamet and Tony Kushner. Other notable world premieres included Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man and Dennis Potter’s only play Sufficient Carbohydrate.

Inevitably this repertory attracted some of the finest creative and acting talent available. Amongst others the tiny Hampstead stage attracted artists as diverse as Ian McKellen, Leonard Rossiter, Jude Law, Zoe Wanamaker,

Chris Harper, I Know How I Feel About Eve 2013 | Alex Lawther, Fault Lines 2014 | Akiya Henry & Laura Morgan, Deposit 2015

Faye Dunaway, Ian Holm, Susan Hampshire, Albert Finney, Eileen Atkins, Ewan McGregor, Harriet Walter, Alan Rickman, Nigel Hawthorne, Elaine Stritch, Frances de la Tour, John Hurt, Penelope Keith, Billie Whitelaw, John Malkovich, Sheila Hancock, David Suchet, Juliet Stephenson, Timothy Spall, Maureen Lipman and many others.

In 2003, with the prefab becoming increasingly dilapidated, a National Lottery grant and the generosity of the local community enabled Hampstead to create its current state-of-the-Art premises. But adjustment to this new home proved unexpectedly difficult both financially and artistically: the much loved but tatty old auditorium was less than half the size of the luxurious new Main House. Accordingly, a very different approach to play selection and production was required, and the early years proved challenging.

In 2010 a comprehensive rethink of the business model was initiated, reducing overhead, investing more money onstage, and starting to present professional productions in the downstairs Studio for the first time.

The new model rapidly yielded results and notable recent successes have included World premieres of four Howard Brenton plays including 55 Days, Drawing the Line and #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei, David Hare’s The Moderate Soprano, Mike Bartlett’s adaptation of Chariots of Fire and his Wild, Beth Steel’s Wonderland and Labyrinth – as well as Hampstead’s first large scale musical, Sunny Afternoon. UK premieres of American plays have included David Mamet’s Race, Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn, David Lindsay Abaire’s Good People and Rabbit Hole and Tony Kushner’s iHo. There have been revivals of plays by Stoppard, Frayn, Hare and Terry Johnson. And Hampstead Downstairs has, since 2010, given World premieres to over 40 plays (many of which have gone on to other stages) whilst Hampstead has transferred eight of its Main Stage productions to the West End. Whilst now operating an unique commercial/funded model at a scale and prominence unimaginable in those early days in the church hall, Hampstead Theatre continues to honour its early creative values, as well as respecting the rich heritage that it has created in the course of its 50-year history.

For more archive photos, please visit our History wall in the lower foyer of the theatre.

Ronak Patani, Pine 2015 | Terry Johnson & Jeremy Stockwell, Ken 2016 | Natalie Dew, Ben Addis, Nicola Kavanagh & Karl Davies, Deposit 2017

BE A PATRON Building on its rich history, Hampstead Theatre is renowned for original, entertaining and ambitious work. We aim to move theatre forward with new ideas, talent and energy to excite our audiences with the lateral, the fresh and the unexpected. Sell-out hits, West End transfers and Olivier Awardwinning triumphs originate with us and will continue to do so thanks to philanthropic support.

Our Patrons’ contribution is vital, and in turn they enjoy a range of benefits which bring them closer to the Theatre they love. These include very popular pre-show receptions and post-show discussions with the cast for every production on our two stages, complimentary tickets and programmes, and backstage tours.

For more information about being a Patron please contact the Development team on 020 7449 4155, development@hampsteadtheatre.com or visit hampsteadtheatre.com/support-us

CAROLINE, OR CHANGE book & lyrics by Tony Kushner, music by Jeanine Tesori

PATRONS & SUPPORTERS INDIVIDUALS

Creative Benefactors Anonymous Celia & Edward Atkin CBE Veronica & Lars Bane Kurt & Paivi Björklund Martin Byman & Peggy Samson Sir Trevor & Lady Chinn Lin & Ken Craig Barbara & Mick Davis Simon & Claire Godwin Andrew & Marina Newington Simon & Midge Palley Maarten & Taina Slendebroek Katja & Nicolai Tangen Mary Ellen & Tom Wanty Mattias Westman Standing Ovation Celia & Edward Atkin CBE Alexander Graham James & Annette Sellar Encore Eric Abraham Tania Black Sir Trevor & Lady Chinn The John S Cohen Foundation The George Colman Charitable Trust Ros & Alan Haigh Madeleine Hodgkin Selina & David Marks Davide & Anna Serra David Tyler & Margaret Fingerhut Opening Night Jocelyn Abbey & Tom Carney Anonymous Russ & Linda Carr Bell Cohen Charitable Trust Scott Delman Dr Natalie Greenwold Melanie J Johnson Martin & Elizabeth Morgan Lady Rayne Sue & Tony Rosner Sophie & David Shalit Melanie & Michael Sherwood Roland & Sarah Turnill Claire Tremeer & Bob Reichert Sarah Williams Preview 1001 Nights Productions Ltd Heather Acton Bob Ainscow Anonymous Kay & Jim Ashton Liz & Mark Astaire Lucy Astor James & Melissa Bethell Pauline & Brian Binstock Françoise Birnholz & Joseph Taussig Niall Booker Katie Bradford Dorothy & John Brook Gillian & Tom Budd Jules & Cheryl Burns Barry & Deborah Buzan Paul & Rachel Campbell Lord & Lady Carlile Paul & Fiona Cartwright Richard & Robin Chapman Dr John L Collins & Mrs Isabel C H Collins Meera Cortesi David Dutton Michael Frayn Ian & Margaret Frost Arnold Fulton Jackie & Michael Gee Jacqueline & Jonathan Gestetner Lisa & Edward Goldfinger Katya Gurova Andrew Harrington & Susan Schoenfeld Harrington Claudia & Christopher Harris Sir Michael & Lady Heller Yew Weng Ho & Gordon Lewis Tracy Hofman Hollick Family Charitable Trust

Sara Holmes-Woodhead Zmira & Rodney Hornstein John Hyatt Andrew & Elizabeth Jeffreys Adam Jones Jean-Charles & Luce Julien Ralph & Patricia Kanter Dr Costas & Dr Evi Kaplanis Julie Kaya & Paul Smith Ian & Deborah Kelson Nicola Kerr Varvara Kjallgren Sarah Kleiman Janet Langdon Jacqueline & Melvin Lawson Wilson & Mabel Lee R Leeming Rose & Dudley Leigh J Leon Charitable Fund Claudia & Richard Leslie Karen & Lawrence Lever Caroline Macdonald & David Simmons Alan Maclean Alexandra Marks CBE Julia & Julian Markson Philip Marsden Mark & Cassy Martell Elizabeth & Ashley Mitchell Catherine & Garry Monaghan Andrew & Jennifer Morris Terry & Jenny Nemko Hugh O'Donnell & Vivienne De Courcy Ellie & Philip Olmer Alison & Simon Parry-Wingfield Karen & Ian Paul Helen Payne & Matthew Greenburgh Penny & Richard Peskin Michael & Livia Prior The Raven Charitable Trust Michaela Rees Jones Kathleen Roberts Cissie Rosefield Charitable Trust Barry Serjent Bhags Sharma Philip & Janice Silvert Lucy & Joe Smouha Margo & Nicholas Snowman OBE Josh & Vivienne Spoerri Josi & Alan Steinfeld QC William & NanDee Stockler Robert & Patricia Swannell Peter Tausig Tobyn & Sam Thomas Marina Vaizey Rob & Laura Wallace Carole & David Warren Sophie & Stephen Warshaw Gideon & Tamara Wood Sir Clive & Lady Woodward Hilda & Marc Worth Dress Rehearsal Anonymous Pauline & Daniel Auerbach Graham & Michelle Barber Maggie Barnes Lisa & Andrew Barnett Ian Bell Ben-Levi Family Lisa & Robi Bernberg The Beryls Ann & Neil Benson Joanne Black & Nick Young Miriam & Richard Borchard Molly Borthwick Clive & Rosalind Boxer Rene Branton-Saran Catharine Browne Steven & Miriam Bruck Fatma Charlwood Maureen Clark-Darby Lord & Lady Collins of Mapesbury Mr & Mrs Leigh Collins Simone & Simon Collins Edward Cooke Katie Cooper Derek Councell & Jenny Dover Allan & Sylvia Cowen Lynette & Robert Craig Mark Dennis QC & Christabel Dennis

Robyn Durie Sally & Steven Dyson Judith Farbey & Prabhat Vaze Vera Farrants Françoise Findlay Gail & Michael Flesch Sue Fletcher Jane & Nigel Franklin Roger & Marilyn Freeman Emma Friedman & Kevin Gold Gillian Frumkin Jenny Garcia Baroness Garden Eleni Gill Julietta Gishen Nick & Fiona Green Elaine & Peter Hallgarten Mark Hamsher & Elna Jacobs Pamela, Lady Harlech Harris Family Charitable Trust Florence & Neil Hasson Jean Hawkins Mary Holness Victoria & Ronald Hooberman Chris Hopson & Charlotte Gascoigne Gillian & Barry Howard Doris & Terry Hugh Dr June Huntington Alan & Louise Jacobs Irina & Russell Jacobs Dr Alison Jones Cassandra & Taig Karanjia Alex & Grace Kay Nina Kaye & Timothy Nathan Richard & Susan Keller Angela & John Kessler Edna Kissmann Roger & Yvette Kutchinsky Anne & Brian Lapping Danielle Lawrence Tania & Olivier Levenfiche Roger & Vivien Lewis Sir Sydney Lipworth QC & Lady Lipworth CBE Claire Livingstone Alison & Michael Lurie Kinvara MacTaggart Guido Manca Nick & Sophie Marple Amanda May Jo McKenna Isabelle Mee Dianne & Martin Mendoza Nadya Menuhin Patricia & Richard Millett Clive Mishon Geoffrey Mitchell Beate Mjaaland David & Sandy Montague Mr Nigel Moore Diana & Allan Morgenthau David & Bev Mullarkey Nicholas Murphy Jonathan Mussellwhite & Daphne Walker Cecilia Orive Hilary Page & Michael Rosenberg Julia Palca & Nicolas Stevenson Parkheath Franchising Deborah & Clive Parritt Jonathan Pfitzner Mrs Kirsten Poler Jacob Polny Sir Brian & Lady Pomeroy Jane & Nick Prentice Kate Rankine Mike & Louise Redferne Donald Rogers Dan Rosenfield Anthony & Lizzie Rosenfelder Brenda & Neill Ross Bob & Pippa Rothenberg The Rubin Foundation Isabelle Rush-Canevet Dick & Mandy Russell Elizabeth Frost Sainty Mariam Moussavi Satrap Louise & Greg Scott Elizabeth Selzer

Suzanne & David Shalson David Sherborne Lucy & Jonathan Silver Brian Smith Karen Smith Dr Diana Spencer Victoria Stark Peter & Prilla Stott James & Imogen Strachan Esther & Romie Tager QC Anthony & Jacqueline Todd Katharine Turner The Andreas and Claudia Utermann Charitable Trust Laurence Vallaeys Nick Viner & Victoria Boyarsky Donna Vinter Carla Wakefield Gerry Wakelin Chris Walsh Paul & Manya Wayne Dr Adrian Whiteson OBE & Mrs Myrna Whiteson MBE Francoise Winton Richard & Susan Wolff David & Vivienne Woolf Katherine Wood J. Wrightson Mrs Karen Yerburgh Michael & Michaela Zelouf

CORPORATE SUPPORTERS Aesop Bennetts Associates Farrow & Ball – Hampstead Showroom Linklaters MAC Cosmetics Nyman Libson Paul

TRUSTS AND FOUNDATIONS

The AKO Foundation The London Community Foundation & Cockayne – Grants for the Arts The Dorset Foundation The Rose Foundation The Rothenberg Family* The Sobell Foundation* Sir Siegmund Warburg’s Voluntary Settlement *Access Programme

HAMPSTEAD DOWNSTAIRS Jocelyn Abbey & Tom Carney The Andor Charitable Trust Anonymous The Cheruby Trust The John S Cohen Foundation Sheila & Denis Cohen Charitable Trust Clore Duffield Foundation Tracy Hofman Mr & Mrs V Meyer Edith and Ferdinand Porjes Charitable Trust James Roose-Evans (Frontier Theatre Prods) The Vandervell Foundation Mary Ellen & Tom Wanty The Peter Wolff Trust

HAMPSTEAD THEATRE LITERARY FUND

Adèle Bennett Legacy The Estate of Margaret Lowy The Estates of Peter Anthony Lund and David Gavin Lund In Memory of Henry & Esther Rudolf The Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation

INSPIRE

Jon & NoraLee Sedmak

HAMPSTEAD STAFF DIRECTORS

Laura Cantergril

Andrea Golinucci

Catherine Carnegie

Christine Gomes

Director of Development

Jae Endris

Caitlin Goodwin

Cathy Baker*

Edith Furlong

Maria Goretti Cabrera

Development Manager

Cory Haas

Sam Harding

Sally Wilson*

Lanna Joffrey

Aliou Janha

Development Manager

Adam Line

Stella Kailides

Jonathan Mace*

Kirsty Osmon

Martin Karadzhov

Jeremy Sandelson

LITERARY

Meera Syal

FRONT OF HOUSE

Literary Manager/

Katja Tangen

AND CATERING

Line Producer

David Tyler (Chair)

Will Mortimer*

Head of Catering

ADVISORY COUNCIL

MARKETING

Acting Head of Front

Dame Jenny Abramsky DBE

Marketing Director

of House

Jess Woodward*

Edith Furlong

Sir Michael Codron CBE

Marketing Manager

Michael Frayn

Kitchen Manager

Lucie Blockley*

Daniel Peltz

Simon Rodda

Press

Peter Phillips OBE

Jo Allan PR

Assistant Kitchen

Paul Rayden

0207 520 9392

Patricia Rothman

Programme Editor

Zeinab Badawi Susie Boyt Gillian Budd James Harding Adam Jones Dan Marks Simon Parry-Wingfield Karen Paul

DEVELOPMENT BOARD Tania Black

Sherry Lau* DEVELOPMENT

Pascale Giudicelli Design

Karen Paul (Chair)

SWD www.swd.uk.com

Simon Parry-Wingfield

PRODUCTION

Susan Schoenfeld

Technical Director

Harrington

Simon Godfrey*

Nicholas Snowman OBE

Head of Lighting

Christopher Spray

Emily Holmden*

Peggy Vance ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Edward Hall*

Deputy Head of Lighting Avril Cook* Head of Stage

Assunta Dogali*

Manager Joe James Duty Managers Matt Barker Jon Cobb Lanna Joffrey William Sebag-Montefiore Colm Tracey Bar Duty Managers

Nellie Kirsh Mauricia Lewis Luyanda Unati Lewis-Nyawo Joseph Lukehurst Claudia Marinaro Alice Morgan Bill Palmer Adam Parkinson Callan Purcell Lizzie Roberts Eddie Sellers Elena Skreka Ben Fox Smith Kyanne Smith Jane Staiano Marlow Stainfield Roberto Tallerico Madeline Young Alessandro Zappala Head Cleaner

Andrew Jardine

William Dike

Sean Matthew Jones

Cleaners

Max Loble

Samuel Gyamfi

Hugh Stubbins

Paul Jachie

Nick Aldrich*

Front of House Staff

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

Deputy Head of Stage

Patrick Bayele

Greg Ripley-Duggan*

Nic Donithorn*

Angelina Chudi

ADMINISTRATION

BOX OFFICE

Director of Operations

Head of Sales

and Associate Producer

Joanne Boniface*

Neil Morris*

Deputy Head of Sales

Production Co-ordinator

and Access Manager

James Easey

Amelia Cherry*

Hannah Gill*

Conor Ensor

Head of Finance

Box Office Assistants

Daniel Fernandez

Ashok Shah

Matt Barker

Holly Gibbs

Finance Officer

Colin Burnicle

Lauren Gibson

Calvin Crawley Jacob Crossley Thomas Crowhurst Geraldine Curtis

*Full time employees

All information and images printed in the Describe the Night Hampstead Programme are the property of Hampstead Theatre.

Edward Hall image HELEN MAYBANKS Caroline, or Change production photography MARC BRENNER

CAFÉ BAR AT HAMPSTEAD THEATRE Enjoy our new menu of delicious gourmet sandwiches, salads and light meals freshly made on site (just like our shows) and served throughout the day.

Pre and post-show, enjoy a glass of wine from our carefully curated menu, a craft beer from Camden Town Brewery or a specialist gin and tonic from The Gin Bar, as well as a selection of organic snacks suitable for everyone’s requirements.

OPENING HOURS Monday - Friday 9am - 11pm Saturday 10am - 11pm Food served 12pm - 7pm

FREE WIFI

See our full menu at hampsteadtheatre.com/cafebar

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DAVID HARROWER MURIEL SPARK

2 AUGUST – 22 SEPTEMBER 2018

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■ Advance Priority Booking for all shows ■ 10% discount at the Café Bar Invitations to the Artistic Director’s ■ Breakfasts ■ Regular e-newsletter, Hampstead Backstage, exclusively for supporters Visit hampsteadtheatre.com/ be-a-friend or call Jonathan Mace in our Development team on 020 7449 4174

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SALLY BRETTON

AN IDEAL SUSAN HAMPSHIRE HUSBAND FRANCES BARBER

FREDDIE FOX

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