Stuart Slade's The King's Ransom runs at the Donmar Warehouse from 5 December 2026 to 6 February 2027.
Stuart Slade writes fast, funny plays about appalling things. BU21, at Theatre503 in 2016 and then the West End, put six survivors of a terrorist attack on a London plane in a room and let them be unbearable to each other; Glee & Me won the Bruntwood Prize. He is one of the few writers working who can get a laugh out of an audience and then make them examine why they laughed, a technique rather than a trick.
The King’s Ransom is new and, in the Donmar’s words, a Southern-fried dark comedy about grief, redemption and spectacularly bad decisions, drawn from one of the strangest crime stories in American history. The Donmar seats two hundred and fifty and has no bad seat, which is why writers give it the plays where a face has to carry the meaning rather than a set.
It runs at the Donmar Warehouse from Saturday 5 December 2026 to Saturday 6 February 2027 — nine weeks, the longest of the theatre’s three announced runs, and the house’s Christmas and new-year slot, which the Donmar gives to a new play rather than a seasonal revival. That is the interesting decision here: two hundred and fifty seats over Christmas, held for a play nobody has read, while every other producing house in London runs something familiar.