Natasha Gordon adapts Bernardine Evaristo’s novel of a sixty-year secret love for the Lyttelton, with Danny Sapani and Gary Beadle directed by Paulette Randall.
Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr Loverman reaches the stage for the first time in the Lyttelton at the National Theatre, South Bank, on Thursday 25 February 2027. Danny Sapani and Gary Beadle lead the cast.
Evaristo published the novel in 2013, six years before Girl, Woman, Other made her the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize. Its hero is Barrington Walker, a 74-year-old Antiguan-born grandfather in Hackney, who has been in love with his best friend Morris for most of his life.
The book gives Barry the floor in a voice full of swagger and evasion, and his wife Carmel answers him in alternating chapters. It won the Jerwood Uncovered Prize in 2014, and the 2024 television adaptation brought Lennie James a BAFTA.
Natasha Gordon adapts it for the stage, and Paulette Randall, a former artistic director of Talawa Theatre Company, directs. Gordon’s play Nine Night made her the first Black British woman playwright to have a play staged in the West End.
Sapani plays Barry, Beadle plays Morris and Jo Martin plays Carmel. Tim Hatley’s design spans six decades of the two men’s lives, from their youth in Antigua to Hackney.