A female-led adaptation of the science fiction blockbuster Minority Report is among a new season of works at London’s Lyric Hammersmith theatre, announced on Monday, placing women at its centre.
Steven Spielberg’s film, about a predictive near-future criminal justice dystopia, was based on a Philip K Dick story and starred Tom Cruise as the pre-crime chief who becomes a fugitive. The play, however, makes the hunted hero a female neuroscientist called Dame Julia Anderton. Set in 2050 and adapted by David Haig, it is produced by the Olivier award-winning team behind Life of Pi, and directed by Max Webster.
The theatre’s artistic director, Rachel O’Riordan, says the play, opening in April, will use “the most cutting-edge technology there is” for its visual effects and ambitious design concept.
Co-produced with Birmingham Rep and Nottingham Playhouse in association with Simon Friend, Minority Report is part of a season that O’Riordan says celebrates the theatre space, utilising the full breadth of the near-600-seater auditorium.
Fangirls, opening in July, will see the auditorium transformed into a pop concert. An Australian musical by Yve Blake about a girl’s obsessive fan worship of a pop band (complete with a Harry Styles type character), it will place the focus on communal audience experience, and is co-produced by Sonia Friedman, who called it “funny and life-affirming”.
O’Riordan took over the helm of the Lyric a year before the pandemic closures and she says the pause led her to rethink the theatre’s purpose. “A key learning from the pandemic was about communal experience. There’s a real thirst right now to congregate and I’m trying to programme in a way that makes people want to come together. As human beings, we need to understand things communally, experience emotions and look at difficult things together. It’s the direct opposite of living life online.”
Fangirls is about fandom, mothers and daughters, and intergenerational connection, but as a theatre experience it will be akin to a big night out, she adds. “You’re going to feel like you’re at the most exciting pop concert ever. If you’re young, it’s going to be like being at a gig with your favourite band. And if you’re not young, it’ll really remind you how it felt to be a fan – that heady rush of euphoria when you were obsessed with a boyband or whatever it might have been. It will hopefully make you sing, dance, cry and go home to hug your mum.”
O’Riordan hopes the season will “resonate with a lot of different people. I have no interest in esotericism. I don’t want people to come to the theatre to observe but to feel like participants.”
The Lyric will focus on building greater partnerships with big commercial producers as well as regional co-producers and international partners, O’Riordan says. Part of its ambition will be to take shows to the West End and Broadway. “We are the second largest subsidised theatre in London after the National Theatre … I want us to be really bold and I want our audiences to have the same quality of experience as West End theatre audiences.”
Among other highlights on the programme is Alice Childress’s 1962 drama Wedding Band, about interracial love in the US in 1918, directed by Monique Touko, who recently staged School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play at the Lyric Hammersmith. The Promise, about dementia in the D/deaf community, written by Paula Garfield and Melissa Mostyn, will be staged in the Lyric’s 100-seater studio space.
O’Riordan says: “We are looking to the past, present and future in our programme … It is almost like an audit of where we are. We can only really understand our present if we are brave enough to look at our past.”
