The presentation of the Hampstead Classics and Downstairs season is suspended until further notice. Read more.

Fellow actors, brother and sister Felice and Clare have been on tour too long: every town looks increasingly the same until they feel they could be anywhere… Abandoned by the rest of the acting company, but faced with an audience expecting a performance, they must enact The Two Character Play. But as their gripping ‘play within a play’ unfolds, the line between reality and illusion becomes increasingly unclear; as their characters reach out to the outside world, the actors’ isolation and uncertainty grows…  

One of the foremost playwrights of the twentieth-century, Tennessee Williams spent over ten years writing The Two Character Play, an innovative, partly autobiographical work which he called ‘My most beautiful play since Streetcar, the very heart of my life’. It returns to Hampstead Theatre for the first time in over fifty years, having received its World Premiere there in 1967.

Sam Yates makes a highly anticipated return to Hampstead Theatre’s Main Stage following his Olivier-nominated production of The Phlebotomist. His West End credits include Glengarry Glen Ross starring Christian Slater (West End) and The Starry Messenger starring Matthew Broderick.

David Dawson plays Felice. His theatre credits include Aristocrats (Donmar), The Duchess of Malfi (Globe), Fairview (Young Vic) and Posh (Royal Court). His television credits include King Alfred in The Last Kingdom, Year of the Rabbit, Ripper Street, Luther and Banished.

Lyndsey Marshal plays Clare. Her theatre credits include Diminished (Hampstead), The Wild Duck (Almeida), Othello (National) and The Pride (Royal Court). Her film credits include Trespass Against Us and The Hours and her television credits include Trauma, Dracula and the title role in Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar.

The Two Character Play is part of Hampstead Theatre’s Classics Season, celebrating 60 years of original theatre with the restaging of four major plays from our archive.

“It seems to me his finest work for a decade, the most successful piece of sustained theatrical writing he has achieved since the first act of Sweet Bird of Youth.  It is good to see the poet laureate of lost grip recover his own”  Ronald Bryden – The Observer

‘Very brave… A haunting play full of ghosts, memories and outcries’
The New York Times on the original Broadway run

(The Two Character Play is presented by special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee)

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