Eurotrash

Ben Whishaw and Kathryn Hunter play a son and his mother in Eurotrash at the Young Vic in Waterloo on Friday 13 November 2026. Colin Teevan adapted the play from Christian Kracht’s novel.

Kracht published the novel in 2021. In it, a blocked novelist called Christian Kracht is summoned to Zurich by his mother. The two set off across Switzerland in a taxi, trying to give away her fortune, built on arms investments and dairy products.

The mother is drinking, medicated and impossible, and the son is complicit in every way a son can be. The family history they drive through is Europe’s own.

Teevan and the director Walter Meierjohann last worked at this theatre a decade ago, on The Emperor. Lizzie Clachan designs. The play holds the Young Vic’s Christmas slot in the Main House, in place of a seasonal show, until Saturday 9 January 2027.

Hunter is the actor other actors go to watch, a physical performer who has played Lear and Richard III. Whishaw has spent twenty years returning to the stage between the films that made him known. The two have never worked together.