Young Vic new season to star Cush Jumbo as Hamlet and Ruth Negga in Marina Carr revival

Leading lights: Ruth Negga will star in a Marina Carr revival and Cush Jumbo will play Hamlet at the Young Vic
Alistair Foster29 May 2019

Star of the Good Wife Cush Jumbo and Oscar-nominee Ruth Negga will both appear on the London stage next year, it was revealed today.

Jumbo will play Hamlet in a new production of the Shakespeare tragedy directed by Greg Hersov at the Young Vic in Southwark.

Hersov gave the London actor — best known for playing attorney Lucca Quinn in the CBS legal drama and its spin-off The Good Fight — her first leading stage role in Pygmalion in 2010.

Three years later she won the Emerging Talent Award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her one-woman show Josephine And I at the Bush Theatre, Shepherd’s Bush.

Negga, who earned an Oscar nod for Loving in 2017 and has appeared in three major London stage productions, will play the titular role in Portia Coughlan, Irish playwright Marina Carr’s haunting portrait of a woman on the brink directed by Caroline Byrne.

Cush Jumbo is set to play Hamlet in a production directed by Greg Hersov
Dean Chalkley

Other highlights of the Young Vic’s 2020 season revealed today include the world premiere of Orfeus: A House Music Opera, a contemporary retelling of Ovid’s myth which blends opera and house music.

The internationally acclaimed 24-hour feat of “endurance performance” and live cinema, The Second Woman, will be performed next June. It features the same scene acted out 100 times by a female character called Virginia for 24 hours, each time with a different male actor and a different outcome.

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Young Vic artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah said: “It is with much joy that I introduce a programme for 2020. My hope is that these plays and these players will do more than just entertain us, they will reflect and refract the times we are living in.”

Kwei-Armah is also planning DJ and club nights in its small theatre The Maria. He added: “We are extremely lucky to have some beautifully versatile spaces at the Young Vic, and it has been an ambition of mine to explore new ways in which to use these spaces in order to play with art and form, and to challenge expectations of how people can engage with our theatre. We cannot wait to invite audiences to experience the Young Vic in an entirely new way.”

The theatre will continue its programme of live debate events with YV:ID Town Hall, and “remains committed” to keeping ticket prices low. This includes allocating at least 10 per cent of tickets free of charge to schools and neighbours.

Tickets go on sale to Friends of the Young Vic on June 18 at 12pm, and to the general public on June 25 at 12pm.

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