Liverpool Playhouse new season

A NEW production of Tennessee Williams’s classic, A Streetcar Named Desire, will be the first Playhouse production of 2012. 

It will be followed by a collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe on Henry V. 

In the New Year the theatres will launch Young Everyman/Playhouse (YEP), an initiative, funded by Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts, which, says the theatre “will put young people at the heart of everything we do”. 

Aimed at 14-25-year-olds, YEP, they say “will nurture the writers and actors, the technicians, the audiences and the cultural leaders of the future”. 

Amanda DrewThis spring, its Young Actors will work with writers including Bryony Lavery to create four new productions in venues and spaces across the city including the Albert Dock, Static Gallery and the Playhouse Studio. 

But the big production is Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama which will be directed by the theatre's artistic director Gemma Bodinez. 

Amanda Drew stars as Blanche Dubois, Sam Troughton as Stanley Kowalski and Leanne Best as Stella Kowalski,. The cast will also feature Annabelle Apsion, Matthew Flynn and Alan Stocks.  

It's first time Tennessee Williams has been produced by the Playhouse in over 30 years. 

Continuing a global theme, two Everyman productions will reach out internationally, with Dave Morrissey's Macbeth available as a digital download and The Caretaker touring to Australia and the USA. 

In April the Playhouse will collaborate with Shakespeare’s Globe on HENRY V which will open its national tour in Liverpool and reach the Globe Theatre in June. The production will be directed by the Globe’s Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole. 

In May Philip Wilson (Noel Coward Double Bill, Dr Faustus, Noises Off) returns to the Playhouse to direct Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests. Ayckbourn’s trilogy, set over one weekend in different parts of a rundown country house, is a comic and poignant portrayal of familial tensions played out from three different viewpoints. 

Digital downloadTickets for will go on sale in March 2012. The plays may be watched in any order and there will be opportunities to watch the full trilogy in one day. 

Then there's the award-winning Mogadishu by Vivienne Franzmann, a Manchester Royal Exchange/Lyric Hammersmith production which explores the clash of youth, class, race and justice. 

Audiences who enjoyed Spymonkey’s Moby Dick in 2009 and Kneehigh’s visit with Hansel and Gretel will be treated to a collaboration between Kneehigh writer Carl Grosse and the anarchic Spymonkey company with Oedipussy. 

The critically acclaimed Bristol Old Vic production of Swallows and Amazons  also arrives following a West End run this Christmas. 

Shared Experience return to the Playhouse to bring to life the tale of Mary Shelley,  Helen Edmundson’s new play explores Shelley’s remarkable life: her controversial philosopher father, her scandalous elopement aged 16 and how she wrote a novel, so radical in its ideology, that in 1817 she changed the literary landscape forever.