Albion

‘It’s England really, isn’t it?

A climate without cloud and rain isn’t honest.’

In the ruins of a garden in rural England, in a house which was once a home, one woman searches for seeds of hope.

Mike Bartlett’s play Albion was premiered in October 2017 at the Almeida Theatre, London, in a production directed by Rupert Goold. It was revived at the Almeida in February 2020.

‘Something remarkable. Our country needs it’
- Telegraph

‘[Has] a deeply reflective and humane quality to it: Bartlett draws his confused characters with a Chekhovian mix of wit and compassion… explores national identity through private mourning, and the meaning of the garden shifts, grows and deepens with the seasons’
- Financial Times

‘Scintillating… in the sometimes abrasive but always compelling Audrey, Bartlett has written a richly imagined female lead who can be mentioned in the same breath as the self-dramatizing Arkadina in The Seagull’
- New York Times

‘A tragicomic paean to England and its discontents, novelistic in scale, combining the acute social observation of traditional British country-house drama with self-consciously Chekhovian grace notes. Downton Abbey meets The Cherry Orchard… a pastoral elegy with grand state-of-the-nation ambitions, [which] delves deep into conflicted notions of patriotism and nostalgia in post-Brexit Britain’
- Hollywood Reporter

‘A work of deeply absorbing emotional richness and symphonic density’
- Independent

‘Fascinating, complex… what makes the play so enormously intriguing is that, as in his King Charles III, Bartlett shows us as a deeply divided people torn between the urge to preserve the past and to radically reform it’
- Guardian

‘Outstanding, thrillingly ambitious theatre’
- Broadway World