Jane Coyle’s award-winning play The Suitcase is to receive its second production in Vienna when the city’s English Theatre stages it in January 2024.
First seen during the Belfast International Arts Festivals in 2015, when it won the Belfast Telegraph Audience Award, its première in the Austrian capital was at the Open House Theatre in 2023.
Inspired by an exhibit in Vienna’s Jewish Museum, the five-hander is “a poignant family drama moving between Belfast in the present day and Europe during its darkest times” and is being revived by arrangement with Northern Irish production company Powerstone Entertainment.
Coyle said, “it is an enormous privilege to bring the play to this prestigious theatre, in the city where its story began. Vienna has held out its arms to us. The Jewish Museum followed the script development from the start. Open House Theatre produced an excellent European première in February this year.”
Director Robert G Neumayr, who led that production, returns for the new staging, which will form part of the English Theatre’s 60th anniversary season.
The cast will include Irish actress Anne Marie Sheridan who lives in Vienna, with choreography by Wei-Ken Liao and design by Vernon Marshall.
The Suitcase will run from January 16 to February 17.