Cast announced for Edition 1 of The Royal Court Theatre’s Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative

Casting has been announced for Edition 1 of the Royal Court Theatre’s Living Newspaper: A Counter Narrative.

The first edition will feature Michele Austin, Natalie Dew, Georgie Fellows, Zainab Hasan, Camille Mallet de Chauny, Rebekah Murrell, Amaka Okafor, Kimberley Okoye, Alexzandra Sarmiento, Irfan Shamji, Sophie Stone, Ragevan Vasan and Danny Lee Wynter.

Living Newspaper is a weekly live newspaper running over six weeks starting on 10 December, which will see the theatre reopen since its closure in March.  

It will be urgent, responsive and fast – with writers filing their pieces by Tuesday and actors performing from Thursday, script-in-hand, hot off the press.

Edition 1 has been written by Miriam Battye, Amir Gudarzi, Nazareth Hassan, Matilda Ibini, Sonia Jalaly, Jasmine Lee-Jones, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Somalia Nonyé Seaton, Katherine Soper, Chris Thorpe, Temi Wilkey and  Daniel York Loh.  

The designers are Shankho Chaudhuri, Debbie Duru, Cara Evans, Sandra Falase, Zoë Hurwitz and Chloe Lamford who have been working as a Design Collective since early 2020. Together they have radically imagined the Royal Court’s spaces for Living Newspaper. Each edition will be overseen by one of the Design Collective, with Debbie Duru and Zoë Hurwitz leading on Edition 1. 

Edition 1 will also include Lighting by Nao Nagai, Sound by Tony Gayle and Emma Laxton and Sound and Music by Nick Powell, Music from Eädyth and Movement direction by Delphine Gaborit. 

Facilitating the first week will be Royal Court Associates Milli Bhatia, Ola Ince, Lucy Morrison and Trainee Director Izzy Rabey.  

Each weekly edition of the newspaper will be created by both a collective of writers responsible for the front page and overall tone of the edition and contributing writers offering individual pieces. It will include performances relating to the moment we are in with local and global perspectives, longer form pieces, dating columns, a cartoon of the week, the world in pictures, a weather room, agony aunts, horoscopes and much more, and all inspired by world events as well as the Design Collective’s spaces. It will be performed in promenade, taking audiences, in person and online, around the Royal Court building on a journey never before available to the public in this way. 

More than 200 freelance artists will work on the project – as well as the writers - over 60 actors (including a commitment to cast a 2020 graduate each week as part of the company), animators, choreographers, composers, designers, illustrators, lighting designers, sound designers, stage managers and technicians. 

Performances for Edition 1 will run Thursday – Saturday with socially distanced audiences of 15 people. There is also the chance for audiences to purchase tickets to watch a digital capture of Living Newspaper online which will be released every Sunday at 5pm (GMT) and will then be available to watch on-demand from Monday 10am – Sunday 4pm (GMT).

For more information and to book tickets, please click here.