Julian Mitchell
After Aida

After the triumphs of Aida and the Requiem in the early 1870s, the composer Verdi has retired to the country. His two friends, Ricordi the publisher and Faccio the conductor, convinced that Verdi should write another opera, finally manage to persuade him to collaborate with the young librettist Arrigo Boito on a new work, Otello. Originally starring Richard Griffiths and Ian Charleson. (Cast 4m, 1f, 2m singers, 2f singers)

“Julian Mitchell has focussed on a turning point in Verdi’s creative life, combined it with a fine selection of opera excerpts, and come up with an intelligent, humourous and accessible piece of theatre.”
~ Helen Rose, Time Out

“...the main business of the drama - the plot to entice the old man from retirement - is quite riveting... For all that we know the outcome, it has us on tenterhooks!”
~ David Cairn, The Sunday Times

“...has been conceived with wit and clarity, written, designed and directed with singular style, [and] enacted with panache, infused with quality!”
~ Sally Osman, Western Mail

“After Aida ... is a triumph in every respect.”
~ Francis Wheen, Sunday Today

Julian Mitchell
Another Country

Another Country is set in an English public school in the early 1930s. The future leaders of the English ruling class are being prepared for their roles in the Establishment. But the two central characters are outsiders: Guy Bennett, coming to terms with his homosexuality, and Tommy Judd, a committed Marxist. Judd wants to abolish the whole system of British life, Bennett wants a successful career within it - but school, and the system, have traditional ways of dealing with rebels. Another Country had a 19-month West End run following its Greenwich Theatre premiere. It was SWET Play of the Year 1982 and subsequently a successful film starring Kenneth Branagh and Rupert Everett. In 2006 the BBC broadcast the first ever radio production as part of Radio 4's 'Betrayal' season of plays. (Cast 10m)

“In this subtle, absorbing and deceptive play, Julian Mitchell persuasively examines the seeds of tribal snobberies sown in the pre-war heyday of the British public school and reaped today in a harvest of spy scandals in top places.”
~ Jack Tinker, Daily Mail

“The politics of the Fourth Year Library are the politics of the upper echelons of the Civil Service; and thus Mitchell is able to write a genuinely exciting and densely political play. His acerbic wit finds a perfect match in the precious self-importance of his subjects.”
~ John Ashford, Time Out

“Mr Mitchell creates the turkish-bath atmosphere of his monastic community most convincingly and his dialogue fizzes and flashes with his wit...”
~ Francis King, Sunday Telegraph

“...a rare, canny piece of play writing.”
~ Ned Chaillet, The Times

Anton Chekhov
August

August is Julian Mitchell's adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, transplanted from the thick birch forests of Russia to the more familiar world of North Wales in the 1890s. By clearing away the dachas, samovars and confusing patronymics Julian Mitchell lifts the veil of ‘foreignness’ from Chekhov’s masterpiece and reveals the universal qualities of the play and its characters. Directed by, and starring, Anthony Hopkins, with Leslie Philips, August was premiered at Theatr Clwyd, Mold, in 1994 and made into a film the following year.
(Cast 5+m, 4+f)

“Mitchell’s translation to Wales is a sharp-edged little joke that’s wittily, consistently sustained.”
~ Robin Thornber, The Guardian

“There can be few greater tributes to the universality of Chekhov’s writing than this brilliant and apparently effortless transplant of his world, his yearning, half-blind characters, their isolation, their semi-articulate feelings and futile violence, into an entirely different culture.”
~ John Peter, The Sunday Times

“[Mitchell’s] English version (with fragments of Welsh) is eminently actable and distinctively captures Chekhov’s extraordinary mixture of wild humour and stabbing heartache.”
~ Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph

Julian Mitchell
Falling Over England

Falling Over England is the moving chronicle of a British family over three generations, from 1945, through the Suez crisis of 1956, to the present. Shifting back and forth in time, the play asks dramatic questions about the relationship between old and young in a country in decline. As national and family skeletons are unearthed, the young fight to preserve their idealism, and the middle-aged to resist indifference and cynicism. They do this with wit and style. But can we ever escape our inheritance — family or national? (Cast 4m, 3f, 2b, 1g)

“It is intelligent, stimulating, full of matter.... I believe his play offers a pointer to the future: that dramatists have to rediscover the art of writing about big ideas on a small scale.”
~ Michael Billington, The Guardian

“It is very well written.... rich in moral insight and aphoristic comedy.”
~ Irving Wardle, Independent on Sunday

“Mitchell is a humane and highly intelligent dramatist, and, as anyone who saw his Another Country will know, can write excellent dialogue, especially for bright young people.”
~ Benedict Nightingale, The Times

Julian Mitchell
Francis

Francis is Julian Mitchell’s new look at the life St Francis of Assisi. It was originally presented at the Greenwich Theatre starring Kenneth Branagh. In the summer of 2006 pupils from Wellington College in Crowthorne staged a production of Francis in Umbria in the grounds of a 1,000 year old abbey where the saint is known to have spent time. The Abbadia Celestina provided an authentic background for the play in a version approved by Julian Mitchell who attended the performance. (Cast 8+m, 2+f)

“Francis ... is a grave and beautiful play. Its theme is the setting up by, that simple, poetical and perhaps most beloved of saints of his 13th-century order dedicated to a life of complete poverty and an example in following the life of Christ.”
~ Harold Atkins, Daily Telegraph

“...one clear virtue of Mitchell’s treatment is that it serves as a salutary correction to the traditional, if hazy, image of the gentle Francis communing with birds and beasts ... his struggles to found and preserve an order based on poverty and a literal reading of the Gospels in the face of the Church’s attempt to institutionalise and dilute his beliefs ...”
~ Malcolm Hay, Time Out