The New Vic has announced a new season of shows for spring 2025.

The theatre will follow up their critically-acclaimed production of The Company of Wolves and Broadway transfer of The Princess and The Pea with a season that includes a new adaptation of the iconic Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death; the world premiere of Arthur Berry’s final play Whatever Happened to Phoebe Salt? - celebrating of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Stoke-on-Trent’s unsung cultural hero, with a new production of innovative theatrical ‘pub quiz’, The Last Quiz Night on Earth.

New Vic Artistic Director Theresa Heskins will adapt and direct a brand-new staging of the iconic British film A Matter of Life and Death by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger from Friday 28 March to Saturday 19 April. Seamlessly blending together romance, drama and fantasy, this new adaptation will feature an amazing live swing band that will bring the era of the story to life and take audiences on an emotional journey, exploring what happens when love, fate and the laws of the universe collide.

Theatrical comedy The Last Quiz Night on Earth will take place at the New Vic from Saturday 8 February to Saturday 1 March, directed by Anna Marsland. Audiences can expect laughs, tears and a few surprises in this hilarious and heartfelt play by Alison Carr, which explores how people might spend their last night together – when a pub quiz takes place just as a massive meteor hurtles towards Earth.

Finally, in June, the New Vic will celebrate the life of local unsung hero, Arthur Berry. The world premiere of Whatever Happened to Phoebe Salt opens on Saturday 31 May to Saturday 21 June and is filled with vivid storytelling and rich characters, and captures the soul of working-class life that Berry was renowned for. Directed by Abbey Wright, this will be the first opportunity to see the never-before-performed Berry play on the stage it was written for.

Alongside the New Vic home-produced shows, the theatre also welcome back the John Godber Company withtheir hugely popular love letter to Northern Soul, Do I Love You? from Tuesday 13 to Saturday 24 May. A sell out success when it visited the New Vic last year, this is another opportunity to join twenty somethings Sally, Nat and Kyle in this hilarious comedy as they develop a love for, and the people involved with, Northern Soul.

New Vic Artistic Director Theresa Heskins said: “The New Vic stage and auditorium keeps pushing us to be ever more inventive both creatively and technically. For Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death a huge challenge is presented – how to create a stairway to heaven in a theatre-in the-round? I’m looking forward to exploring that challenge with an inspiring creative team and staging another impossible-to-stage play. Alison Carr’s 2020 play The Last Quiz Night on Earth will take advantage of the inclusiveness of the round too, with the audience becoming the regulars at the Four Horsemen Pub.

“Arthur Berry was writing specifically for our theatre-in the round with Whatever Happened to Phoebe Salt. It’s such a privilege to be producing his final play, written for the New Vic in 1988 but never performed.  Berry was a local cultural icon – playwright, poet, painter, broadcaster and raconteur – at a time when regional voices were regarded as precisely that.  But when we took our production of Marvellous, the story of Neil Baldwin, to the West End’s newest theatre @sohoplace, and were asked by people from Kentucky to Korea whether it might tour to them, we realised how much the world has changed.  It’s time for Berry’s unique voice to be heard by a wider audience, and we hope this ‘rediscovery’ will be the beginning.”

Tickets for the New Vic’s spring season go on sale on Friday 25 October 2024. For more information visit newvictheatre.org.uk or call the Box Office on 01782 717962.