Rhys Warrington's Monument runs at the Royal Court from 3 December 2026 to 23 January 2027, directed by Francesca Goodridge.
The Royal Court has staged first plays for seventy years, and the ones that last tend to come from somewhere specific rather than from an idea. Rhys Warrington’s Monument is set in a Welsh farming community that has been through a tragedy, been reported on by the world, and now has to decide together what shape a memorial should take. It is a subject with a great deal underneath it in Wales, and one nobody has put on a London stage.
The argument about a memorial is always an argument about who owns the grief, and a village hall is the right room for it. Wales has a great many of them, and the ones that work were argued over for years by the people who had to live beside them, which is the process the play puts on stage rather than the outcome. A first play with a chorus of a village in it is an ambitious shape to attempt.
Francesca Goodridge directs, and it runs from Thursday 3 December 2026 to Saturday 23 January 2027. It holds the theatre’s Christmas and new-year slot — a new play by an unproduced writer, over the period every commercial house in London gives to something safe. It overlaps The Afronauts through December, so for three weeks the building is running two first-time writers at once.