Gayle Rankin

Vicky Featherstone

Citizens Theatre

A powerful and deeply human portrait of America’s working class at the dawn of the 21st Century.   

In a small Rust Belt town in Pennsylvania, friendships are forged through sweat and laughter. For decades, Tracey and Cynthia have worked side by side, bound by shared history and hard-earned pride. But when whispers of layoffs grow louder, opportunity turns into betrayal. A community built on solidarity begins to splinter, as bitter resentments and unspoken racial divides rise to the surface.    

Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a raw exploration of fractured industries, economic disparity, and the deep divisions that helped shape modern America. As Tracey and Cynthia’s sons, Jason and Chris, inherit the fallout of a broken system, their anger and desperation erupt. Gripping and profoundly resonant, Sweat is a story of loyalty, loss, and the unrelenting fight for survival in an unforgiving world.

Sweat

Anna Bennett is this close to losing it. She’s not sleeping. She’s not writing. She’s barely mothering. And then she and her son find something in the garden—something small, something wrapped in secrets, something that makes the past feel very present. 

Night Waking

Samira, a Scottish Aid Worker, goes through a ‘baptism of fire’ during the revolutions in the Middle East. Certain she can make a difference, she takes on mission after mission, but is quickly confronted by the reality of war, aid work and her own disillusionment.

Revolution Days

Glasgow, 1957. A family destroyed. A man who insists he knows why. 

Between whisky-soaked confessions and half-truths swirling in cigarette smoke, William Watt and Peter Manuel share a night that will change everything. Winding through stale-aired bars, shadowed backstreets and tangled lies – leading to one of the most infamous trials in Scottish history. 

From one of Scotland’s most acclaimed crime writers, Denise Mina, and adapted by award-winning playwright Linda McLean, The Long Drop is an electrifying new play – equal parts psychological thriller and pitch-black comedy. Gritty and gripping, it plunges us into a world of gangsters, gossip, and half-truths told over one too many drinks. 

The Long Drop

The Thought Police monitor every word you say.  

Children spy on their parents and the Party has abolished the truth. 

In this totally controlled world, Winston and Julia begin a love affair which catapults them into rebellion against the Party. 

The nightmare of a totalitarian society built on terror and lies is brought to vivid life in this powerful new adaptation of Orwell’s final novel, which dramatises Winston and Julia’s epic battle to be human against all odds. 

In 2026, George Orwell’s terrifying post-truth world of ‘alternative facts’ is more relevant than ever before. 

1984

The Singer is a bold, new, thrilling piece of gig-theatre about Joe, a deaf artist who “sings” with his hands, and Andy, a washed-up musician hungry for a comeback. Joe experiences music viscerally and physically, feeling rhythm through his body and crafting lyrics that pulse with life and exhilarating originality. When their unlikely creative partnership sparks something extraordinary, ambition and belonging collide. But as prejudice and the music industry’s ableist blind spots close in, their bond is pushed to breaking point.  

The Singer

Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life’  

At the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, junior-school teacher Miss Jean Brodie is famously, in her prime.    

Each year, Brodie selects her ‘set’. The crème de la crème of girls whom she will shape through art and politics, stories of sexual liberation and titillating glimpses of the women they could become. In return, she demands utter loyalty from them all.    

Witty, seductive and swirling in contradictions, Brodie’s mythical ability to invent her own truths and manipulate her girls ultimately leads her to risk everything.      

In an adaptation by David Harrower, which sharpens the knives of Spark’s extraordinary work, and with a cast lead by Gayle Rankin (Glow, House of The Dragon), this visceral production looks head on at our enduring moral fascination with such a beguiling and dangerous character.  

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie