Full creative team announced for the world premiere of Never Let Me Go

The full creative team for the new stage adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is now in place and includes Suzanne Heathcote (Adapter), Christopher Haydon (Director), Tom Piper (Set and Costume Designer), Ayse Tashkiran (Movement Director), Joshua Carr (Lighting Designer), Eamonn O’Dwyer (Composer), Carolyn Downing (Sound Designer), Sam Jones CDG (Casting Director), Haruka Kuroda (Fight Director) and Emma Denson (Assistant Director).

Following on from the success of Royal & Derngate’s Made in Northampton production of The Remains of the Day in 2019, the theatre is delighted to be bringing the world premiere adaptation of another of Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s well-loved novels to the Royal stage this autumn. Never Let Me Go is a Royal & Derngate co-production with Rose Theatre, Bristol Old Vic and Malvern Theatres.

This international best-selling novel has been adapted for the stage by award-wining playwright and screenwriter Suzanne Heathcote, a lead writer for TV series Killing Eve, and the production will be directed by Christopher Haydon, whose productions of The Remains of the Day and The Caretaker have previously been seen by Northampton audiences.

As the production was announced this spring, author Kazuo Ishiguro said: “I’m filled with excitement by news of the upcoming production of Never Let Me Go. Suzanne Heathcote is a superb writer for both stage and screen. Christopher Haydon directed a beautiful adaptation of my The Remains of the Day not long ago. And the arrival of this new version of Never Let Me Go feels particularly well-timed. Its central question – How do we find and hold onto love in a world ruled by out-of-control science and savage hierarchical structures? – feels even more haunting today than when I wrote the novel twenty years ago. I look forward to discovering how this wonderfully talented team will re-imagine the story for the stage and for our time.”

You were brought into this world for a purpose.

And your futures – all of them – have been decided.

What if you discovered your whole reason for being was not about your life but about making someone else’s possible? Your dreams, your desires, your love for another, all of them irrelevant in a world that values only what you give, without question or condition, to someone you’ve never met and will never know.

Memory and reality collide in this stunning new staging that challenges us to think about what it means to be human. What it means to have hope and heart — to love and to lose.

This gripping adaptation of the acclaimed novel will be transferring to Royal & Derngate after its opening at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, before touring.

Never Let Me Go takes to the Royal stage from Wednesday 16 to Saturday 26 October, as part of Royal & Derngate’s Made in Northampton season. To book tickets, call Box Office on 01604 624811 or online at www.royalandderngate.co.uk.

The Made in Northampton season is sponsored by Michael Jones Jeweller.