Anne-Marie Duff features in Helen Edmundson's new play, directed by Blanche McIntyre in the Dorfman Theatre, 7 October to 21 November 2026.
Helen Edmundson was born in Liverpool in 1964 and made her name adapting: Anna Karenina in 1992, The Mill on the Floss in 1994, Coram Boy in 2006, Small Island in 2019, all of them large novels compressed for a stage without the joins showing, which is a specialised craft and one she is among the two or three people in Britain to do well. She writes originals too, The Clearing and Queen Anne among them, but they come less often.
Some Woman is new, and it is about an ordinary woman who refuses to be quiet and what that refusal costs her. Anne-Marie Duff plays her — an actor who has spent thirty years finding the rage inside undemonstrative parts, from Saint Joan to Husbands and Sons — and Blanche McIntyre directs.
It runs in the Dorfman from Wednesday 7 October to Saturday 21 November 2026. Six weeks is a full run for a new play in that room, and it is the only wholly original work on the National’s autumn slate: everything else on the three stages this season is an adaptation, a revival or a transfer. Whether that is a programming failure or a reasonable read of the market is the argument the building has been having with itself for years. Duff has not been on the South Bank in some years.