Michael Grandage returns to the National Theatre to direct Emma Corrin and Harriet Walter in Tennessee Williams’s rarely staged Suddenly Last Summer, in the Olivier.
Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer opens in the Olivier at the National Theatre on the South Bank on Friday 19 February 2027, directed by Michael Grandage.
Williams wrote the play in New York in 1957, and it opened off Broadway in January 1958 as half of a double bill called Garden District. He said he thought it perhaps the most poetic thing he had written.
It is set in 1936, in the garden of a New Orleans mansion. The widow Violet Venable will fund a young doctor’s research if he will lobotomise her niece, Catharine, who was with Violet’s son Sebastian when he died abroad. The 1959 film, with Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift, made the play famous.
London first saw it in September 1958, under club conditions at the Arts Theatre, and the West End only in 1999. Grandage directed it in 2004 at the Lyceum in Sheffield, with Diana Rigg as Violet, and that production transferred to the Albery.
This staging returns him to the National after more than 15 years, with Christopher Oram designing.
Emma Corrin, known from The Crown, plays Catharine, and Harriet Walter plays Violet. Arty Froushan plays the doctor.