August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean, the first play chronologically in his ten-part Century Cycle, gets its first British staging in twenty years at the Young Vic.
Gem of the Ocean opens at the Young Vic in Waterloo on Friday 14 May 2027, its first British staging in 20 years. It is the first play chronologically in August Wilson’s Century Cycle.
Wilson spent 25 years writing ten plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century. Nine of them are set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. Two of them won the Pulitzer.
He left school at fifteen and educated himself in the public library. He finished the cycle in 2005, the year he died.
The play is set in 1904, though Wilson wrote it ninth. Aunt Ester, who claims to be 285 years old and appears or is invoked throughout the cycle, washes souls at 1839 Wylie Avenue. A young man arrives needing his cleaned.
Companies usually stage the plays one at a time, and the cycle has been thin on British stages for a decade. The run takes the Main House through the London Season, opposite Ascot and Wimbledon, until Saturday 10 July 2027.
Nadia Fall directs. She ran Theatre Royal Stratford East for six years and now runs the Young Vic.