A new London theatre based in the Grade II-listed building Rudolf Steiner House will open in London in September. The Marylebone Theatre, supported by Mark Rylance, will launch with Friedrich Schiller’s Dmitry, written by Peter Oswald, who was resident playwright at Shakespeare’s Globe under Rylance. The play completes an unfinished work by Friedrich Schiller titled Demetrius.

The Marylebone theatre is based in the refurbished space formerly known as Steiner Hall near Baker Street. The theatre will present “the best new writing alongside high quality dance, music and spoken word” and its patrons – alongside Rylance – include English National Opera Music Director Martyn Brabbins, founder of Ruskin Mill College Aonghus Gordon and cross-bench peer Usha Prashar. The theatre will stage new plays which it will produce itself as well as being a home for incoming companies.

Demetrius will be directed by former Young Vic artistic director Tim Supple who returns to the UK to direct this production. It has been described as a “timely exploration of the historic and tragic conflict between Russia’s leaders and the West”. The creative team includes designer Robert Innes Hopkins, lighting by Jackie Shemesh and casting director Helena Palmer.

Oswald’s drama is inspired by the incomplete Demetrius, about the eponymous Russian czar at the start of the 17th century. Schiller worked on his play in the months leading up to his death in 1805. Supple said it gives a timely and “frighteningly vivid” perspective on Russia.

In the play, Dmitry claims the Russian throne, saying he is the son of Ivan the Terrible, and the Polish army rallies behind him in his bid to topple Boris Godunov. “In Russia, history treats him as an aggressive pseudo-pretender,” said Supple. “Schiller was interested in the clash between the Roman Catholic church and the Russian Orthodox church. There’s also the geopolitical clash between the West as represented by the papal interest in Poland and the East as represented by the Orthodox church in Russia.”

Marylebone Theatre artistic director of Alexander Gifford, and dramaturg of Dmitry, said: “We are starting as we mean to go on with a production that is bold and important. Dmitry is a gripping rollercoaster ride through the battles and intrigues of the 17th century right to the heart of the politics of our times. It pairs our greatest living verse dramatist, Peter Oswald, with the internationally acclaimed director Tim Supple while drawing on the vision and inspiration of the incomparable Friedrich Schiller.”

Gifford added: “I hope it will launch Marylebone Theatre as an important new presence on the London cultural scene, which develops brilliant new drama while also hosting and supporting the best artists in the fields of music, dance and poetry.”

Supple said the play considered Russia’s bid, over the centuries, “to secure around it a huge sphere of influence and control – and whether you look on that as ongoing paranoia or deep-seated cultural aggression or its rightful need to defend itself against the West’s overwhelming desire to possess Russia”.

Schiller, best known for his plays Mary Stuart and Don Carlos, “could take a historical situation and address it with compact and extremely potent verse and give us a fantastically compelling human drama,” said Supple. He added that Marylebone theatre, which sits just over 200 people, is “small enough to be intimate and large enough to deal with subjects of scale”.

Mark Rylance said he supported the theatre’s plans for “fostering a renaissance in verse drama”. Rylance’s late step-daughter, Nataasha van Kampen, attended a Rudolf Steiner school in north London. Rudolf Steiner House was built between 1926 and 1937 as the British home of the Anthroposophical Society, founded to further the work of the “spiritual scientist” Steiner.

Supple said he could not think of a “more thrilling prospect than to open a new theatre space in London with a new play by the exceptional Peter Oswald”.

“That this play should resurrect an unfinished work by Schiller and shine a brilliant light on a most urgent concern of the modern era is a further miracle. How daring to defy the challenges of our time and open a theatre with a verse drama that reaches back through the lens of a European master to grasp the intractable and thorny question of how it is that Russia and the West are locked in such a deadly embrace, and how it might be possible to transform bloodshed into kinship,” he said.

The Dmitry cast and the remainder of the launch season will be announced later in June.

In July, Supple will also run a training course for actors at the theatre, called The Art of Acting. The course is a distillation of Supple’s work – influenced by “methods, theatre traditions and cultures around the world”.

New Marylebone Theatre opens with unfinished Friedrich Schiller play

Dimitry

Marylebone Theatre

Kelvin Sollis

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