Tilda Swinton and Gary Oldman return to the stage for the Royal Court’s 70th anniversary | Royal Court Theater

Tilda Swinton returns to the stage for the first time in more than 30 years as part of the Royal Court’s 70th anniversary programme, in reprisal of her 1988 solo performance in Manfred Karge’s Man to Man.

Swinton’s return to the role, in which she plays a widow who assumes the identity of her dead husband, is one of two stars in David Byrne’s third season as artistic director, which will also star Gary Oldman in another revival: Samuel Beckett’s The Last Krapp strip which premiered in 1958.

Byrne said the program was inspired by a return to look back at the theatre’s first season and is a “year-long party” featuring “entire performances that talk about where we are now and where we might go next.”

There will be the world premiere of Luke Norris’ romantic drama Guess How Much I Love You?, starring Robert Aramayo and Rosie Sheehy – which Byrne describes as being about “impossible choices and enduring love”.

Ryan Calais Cameron, who first worked with Byrne on New Diorama, brings another world for the first time to the stage in the guise of his play about the real-life story of the Zambian space race in Astronauts, which Byrne describes as a masterpiece.

The season will also include two European premieres in the form of Kimberly Bellefleur’s John Proctor Is the Villain, which transfers from Broadway and is a loose retelling of The Crucible; While Archduke Rajiv Joseph retells the assassination of Franz Ferdinand with stage design by S. Devlin.

The theatre’s executive director, Will Young, said the program was a mix of “safe bets and classical revival” and that in a time of “cultural austerity” the Royal Court had a responsibility to invest in playwrights.

The theater will also collaborate with BBC Radio Four, with Mark Ravenhill – who made his name at the Royal Court with his play Shopping and Fuck – reviewing archives and creating new adaptations of Royal Court plays.

Byrne inherited an internal box full of issues at the Royal Court when he started in 2023. The old business model that “upheld the right to fail as well as success” was no longer sustainable, the theater’s boss said, leading to an operation that reshaped the literary department while redundancies loomed at the institution.

But after calls for the new diorama’s former artistic director to have time to present his vision, Byrne succeeded in making his mark on the stage, using a combination of star power and experimental commission to get spectators back into the seats.

He said musicals would be a big part of his tenure, introducing a “group” of partners including Ryan Calais Cameron and Mike Bartlett to help shape the program and calling for state support for young playwrights to avoid a “lost generation.”

His first season featured Ben Whishaw in a film adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s play Bluets, and John Lithgow starred in Roald Dahl’s anti-Semitic drama, Colossus, which was directed by former National Theater artistic director Nicholas Hytner and transferred to the West End and then Broadway, where it will be released in March 2026.

Byrne’s second season featured Robert Icke’s take on Raoul’s death saga Manhunt and a revival of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 novel Psychosis. His approach has proven popular: in September, the theater announced that it had sold out all of its regular shows for the remainder of 2025.

The first work includes a story about cannibals living in caves (Jack Nichols’s The Shitheads), and a play about digital voyeurism and deep porn (Are You Watching?). There’s a story about a pregnant woman renting an Airbnb and an inheritance (My Blood) and a Welsh community torn apart by tragedy (Rhys Warrington Memorial).

Palestinian-Israeli writers and performers Youssef Sweid and Isabella Sedlak present their acclaimed play Between the River and the Sea, which was originally produced by the Maxim Gorky Theater in Berlin and also performed at the Edinburgh Festival.