The Royal Shakespeare Company has revealed the cast for its new staging of David Edgar’s play Maydays.
First staged by the RSC at the Barbican Theatre in 1983, the new production will be performed as part of the Autumn Mischief Festival in The Other Place in Stratford.
The cast comprises Geoffrey Beevers (Trelawney / Pugachev), Gillian Bevan (Mrs Glass / Weiner), Richard Cant (Jeremy), Sophie Khan Levy (Clara / Judy), Chris Nayak (Phil / Korolenko), Lily Nichol (Amanda / Erica), Mark Quartley (Martin), Christopher Simpson (James Grain / Paloczi), Liyah Summers (Bryony / Tanya) and Jay Taylor (Lermontov).
Maydays, revived in the 50th anniversary year of the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the student-worker uprising in Paris and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, tells the story of idealistic young people who came of age in 1968 and were drawn into revolutionary politics.
The play tells the interlocking stories of a vicar’s son turned student radical, a young Communist who becomes a Conservative ideologue, a single mother and political activist, and a Soviet army officer who ends up as a dissident.
The production is directed by Owen Horsley who was last at the RSC in 2017 directing Oscar Wilde’s Salome in the Swan Theatre. Before that, he worked as Gregory Doran’s associate director on the King and Country cycle of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V which toured to New York, China and Hong Kong. He also directed the Chinese version of Henry V in Shanghai as part of the RSC’s Chinese Folio Translation project.
Joining Horsley on the creative team are designer Simon Anthony Wells, lighting designer Claire Gerrens, sound designer Steven Atkinson and Polly Bennett who looks after movement. Maydays will run from 27 September until 20 October.
As part of the Autumn Mischief Festival, there will be three performances of David Edgar’s one-man solo show Trying It On at The Other Place on 18, 19 and 20 October. It marks his professional debut as a performer after 50 years of writing. The production is directed by Christopher Haydon and produced by China Plate as part of its new partnership with Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry.