‘Minority Report’ Stage Play to Premiere in U.K. in 2024
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Minority Report is the latest Hollywood blockbuster to get the stage — and gender-swap — treatment.
The science fiction tech noir based on Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella and later made into the 2002 box office hit directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, is being turned into a play that will make its world premiere in the U.K. in spring 2024. The show is part of a co-production between three U.K.-based theaters in association with Simon Friend Entertainment and by arrangement with Electric Shepherd Productions.
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Adapted by actor-writer David Haig with Life of Pi‘s Max Webster set to direct, the new stage play will hold its world premiere at Nottingham Playhouse, opening on Feb. 16 and running through March 9. It will then have two more separate runs, first at Birmingham Repertory Theatre from March 22 to April 6, followed by a month-long staging at London’s Lyric Hammersmith between April 19 and May 18.
The show is the latest in a small series of productions bringing stories from the big and small screen to the stage. Those include the Stranger Things prequel opening on the West End in December, a 13 Going on 30 production from the film’s writers, and a Paranormal Activity stage play, which, like Minority Report, is being produced by Simon Friend and his eponymous production banner.
The show was commissioned several years ago, according to Friend. “But with its prescient central theme of personal technological surveillance, it has only become more alarmingly relevant to the world in which we live, despite the original story having been written in 1956,” he said in a statement.
The show, which is promising the use of “cutting edge technology to create a world at the borders of science fiction and reality,” will feature a creative team that includes production designer Jon Bausor, video designer Tal Rosner, lighting designer Jessica Hung Han Yun, music and sound designer Nicola T. Chang and movement director Lucy Hind. Lotte Hines overseeing casting, which will be announced at a later date.
In Haig and Webster’s adaptation, the story is set in 2050, and Cruise’s character is now a female neuroscientist, Dame Julia Anderton. Head of a special police unit responsible for solving crimes before they happen, the whodunnit thriller sees Anderton in a race to find out why she’s been framed for a crime she hasn’t committed yet — and by whom.
“I’m really pleased to be directing Minority Report — a story so many people know and love — but which, in David Haig’s thrilling retelling, suddenly becomes a chillingly relevant thriller about law, justice and the power of technology to predict the future,” Webster said in a statement.
“It’s been the most exciting challenge of my career: to write a futuristic thriller for the stage, based on one of the greatest sci-fi stories ever told,” Haig added in a statement of his own.
The version of Dick’s story most are familiar with is that of Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated big screen take, set in the near-future of 2054 where predictive crime technology has warped criminal justice and society into a full-blown dystopia.
Cruise portrays Chief John Anderton, a precrime program commanding officer who finds himself trying to challenge the very machine he’s spent years working for. That’s a mission spurred after the precogs — a set of clairvoyant humans whose psychic impressions of impending crimes are the basis of the entire precrime program — predict he will kill someone he’s never met. The film earned more than $350 million at the global box office.
The sci-fi thriller was also adapted for the small screen as a sequel, developed by Max Borenstein and marking the first Spielberg movie to be adapted for TV. The one-season show for Fox, which ran in the fall of 2015, was produced by Amblin Television, 20th Century Fox Television and Paramount Television and starred Stark Sands, Meagan Goode and Nick Zano.
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