Classic tale hits the stage

The world premiere of a new stage adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian masterpiece can be seen there until Saturday, October 17.

The touring production is presented by Touring Consortium Theatre Company and Royal & Derngate Northampton.

Brave New World, widely considered to be one of the finest and most prophetic dystopian novels of the 20h century, bursts into life on stage in an adaptation by award-winning playwright Dawn King, directed by James Dacre and designed by Naomi Dawson, with an original new music by the groundbreaking British band These New Puritans.

Sophie Ward, whose extensive screen credits include TV series Land Girls, Heartbeat and Holby City, and films including Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Young Sherlock, plays Margaret Mond, the Regional World Controller for Western Europe (a character that was the male Mustapha Mond in the original novel).

Her theatre work includes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Go Back For Murder and Private Lives. Olivier Award-winning Abigail McKern, last seen in Northampton in A Tale of Two Cities and fresh from Shakespeare in Love in the West End, takes the role of Linda.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was first published in 1932, and is widely seen to be one of the most important novels of the 20th century, anticipating developments in reproductive technology, psychological manipulation and behavioural conditioning. Set 600 years in the future human life has been almost entirely industrialised, and humans are created and conditioned in a lab according to a strict caste system, in a World State whose motto is “Community, Identity, Stability”. Monogamy, the family unit and the ‘natural’ process of giving birth, are considered horrific and unnatural, and material comfort and physical pleasure - provided by the drug soma and recreational sex — represent society’s highest good.

Dawn King said: “Huxley’s novel is over 80 years old, but his vision of the future is shockingly familiar. In many ways, we already live in Brave New World: a glittering dystopia built on inequality.”

Ticket details are available on 0115 9895555.