Four plays which “examine issues affecting people who have been marginalised in society” will form the basis of the 2025–26 season at Northampton’s Royal and Derngate.
Artistic director Jesse Jones said, “I’m delighted to announce a season of work that I hope will speak to our audiences at Royal and Derngate and around the country. The plays in this Made in Northampton programme give voice to people whose lived experience has collided with insidious power structures that look to oppress them.
“These brilliant plays are thought-provoking and challenging as well as hugely entertaining and surprising in the same breath. We hope they will spark conversations about how we as a society and industry can build a better future. It’s a privilege to be working once again with so many exceptional partners and artists to deliver this exciting season.”
Hugh Whitemore’s play Breaking the Code tells the story of Alan Turing’s career as a visionary mathematician and codebreaker, and how society’s attitude towards his sexuality changed the course of his life.
It will be revived in a new production on the Royal stage directed by the venue’s artistic director, Jesse Jones. The play will feature “new material that speaks to Turing’s lasting legacy for modern Britain”. Co-produced with Landmark Theatres and Oxford Playhouse, the production will open in Northampton in September 2025 before touring.
In spring 2026, the world première of Top G’s Like Me by Samson Hawkins, directed by Jesse Jones, will involve the Derngate auditorium being transformed into Northampton’s Radlands skatepark “in which a group of rudderless young adults enter a post-playground world of seething toxic masculinity, poisonous social media and black-market Ben and Jerry’s deliveries”. The comedy “will ask big questions of the online space and how it influences young minds”.
Jane Upton’s new play (the) Woman will explore how women can keep hold of their own identities and maintain the status quo after becoming mothers. The play, which was listed for the 2022 Bruntwood Prize, is “relatable, funny and unflinching in its portrayal of being a working mother”. The world première will be co-produced with New Perspectives and will be directed by its artistic director Angharad Jones. After opening at Royal and Derngate in February 2025, the play will tour the UK.
A “hip-hop concert, an Afro-futuristic lecture, an absurdist minstrel show”, Tambo and Bones “interrogates the commodification and commercialisation of black pain in a satirical rollercoaster of a play”. Directed by Matthew Xia, it received its UK première at Stratford East in 2023 and will return in 2025 for a UK tour, opening in Northampton in March. It will be produced by Royal and Derngate, Actors Touring Company and Stratford East in association with Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre, Leeds Playhouse and Liverpool Everyman.
Meanwhile, Royal and Derngate has announced the creative team for the 2024 production of The Jolly Christmas Postman. Adam Peck will adapt the piece and Jones will direct. Songs will be by Darren Clark, set and costume design by Abby Clarke, lighting design by Ric Mountjoy, sound design by Beth Duke and movement direction and choreography by Stacey McCarthy. The cast of six has still to be announced. It will run from Saturday 7 until Tuesday 31 December.