Quentin Tarantino’s play The Popinjay Cavalier prepares for its West End premiere | stage

Since Quentin Tarantino announced last year that he had written his first play, it has remained as mysterious as the contents of Marcellus Wallace’s suitcase in Pulp Fiction. But it was announced on Wednesday that the play, which Tarantino will also direct in London, will be a stage play ““A raging comedy of deception and disguise” set in 1830s Europe.

According to publicity materials, The Popinjay Cavalier is inspired by “swashbuckling epics of stage and screen” and is “a sweeping celebration of theater and its heightened romanticism, told in Tarantino’s signature style and unmistakable wit.” Rumors have recently circulated that the play will be a “classic British drop-the-pants” farce. Popinjay Cavalier, from Sonia Friedman Productions and Sony Pictures Entertainment, will be developed this year with a planned opening date of early 2027 at a West End theater yet to be announced.

In an interview last year with The Church of Tarantino podcast, the director confirmed that the play was “absolutely my next project” and suggested that if it had success in the West End, there would also be a tour. “If it fails, I will end it very quickly,” he added. Tarantino, who now lives in Tel Aviv, said he will move to England with his family to work on the play, and that it will take between 18 and 24 months of his life.

The Popinjay Cavalier will be the theatrical debut for the filmmaker, who turned novelist in 2021 with a version of his 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, published by HarperCollins. This was his ninth and most recent film as a director, and he said that he would withdraw after directing his tenth film. Tarantino has written a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood titled The Adventures of Cliff Booth, directed by David Fincher for Netflix. A sample of the film aired between Super Bowl ads and trailers in February. The director’s two-part revenge thriller Kill Bill was released as a blockbuster, with numerous edits and additions, late last year.

Although new to theatre, the acclaimed director and filmmaker has already demonstrated his mastery of focusing on claustrophobic, singular interiors such as the stagecoach inn in The Hateful Eight (2015), which has drawn comparisons to playwright Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.

Popinjay Cavalier is not Tarantino’s first taste of London theatre. In 2023, Riverside Studios presented a Tarantino Live production that, as Guardian critic Ryan Gilbey wrote, mixed the director’s films and their respective soundtracks together “to create a monumental mélange of songs, speeches and clipped ears.”

Casting for the play has not yet been announced. In recent months, Tarantino has made headlines for publicly criticizing Paul Dano as a “weak, uninteresting man” and saying that Pulp Fiction star Rosanna Arquette showed a “clear lack of class” when she expressed distaste for his use of the N-word in that film.