Blanche McIntyre directs Tom Stoppard's Jumpers on Hampstead Theatre's Main Stage, 25 November 2026 to 23 January 2027.
Tom Stoppard wrote Jumpers for the National Theatre in 1972, when he was thirty-four and had one hit behind him. It is a farce about moral philosophy. A professor of ethics is trying to write a lecture proving that God exists; his wife, a retired musical star, is having a breakdown in the next room; a member of a troupe of acrobats is shot dead during a party, and the corpse spends much of the play in a cupboard. Everyone saw him shot. Nobody saw who fired.
The play was received as impossibly clever and has since been recognised as something warmer than that — the marriage at the centre of it is real, and the argument about whether goodness is anything more than a habit is one Stoppard clearly cared about. Hampstead has a long record with new writing that argues rather than depicts, and Blanche McIntyre is one of the few directors currently trusted with plays that argue in this register.
Blanche McIntyre directs it on Hampstead Theatre’s Main Stage from Wednesday 25 November 2026 to Saturday 23 January 2027. It is a Hampstead production rather than a transfer, which for a play of this scale in a room of three hundred and twenty-five is an ambitious piece of programming, and it holds the stage over Christmas and into the new year.