A Mirror Tickets

A Mirror is more than a political satire, being an immersive experience in which the audience is constantly kept guessing and asked to question their own integrity as layer after layer is peeled off.

Playwright Sam Holcroft’s credits include Rules of Living and Edgar and Annabel at the National Theatre. Director Jeremy Herrin is former artistic director of Headlong, and his productions include Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, People, Places and Things by Duncan Macmillan, and Labour of Love by James Graham.

The cast is a starry one: Jonny Lee Miller who plays registrar and state censor Čelik, recently played another political role as John Major in The Crown. Miller’s other credits include Trainspotting, Elementary, and Jane Austen heroes Edmund Bertram and Mr Knightley in Mansfield Park and Emma respectively. He is joined by Tanya Reynolds (Delicious, Sex Education) as Mei, the bride; Samuel Adewunmi (The Last Tree, You Don’t Know Me) as Adem, the groom; and Geoffrey Streatfeild (Spooks, The Hollow Crown) as best man and playwright Bax.

What to watch for

• As artistic director of Headlong Theatre, Jeremy Herrin directed an acclaimed production of Duncan Macmillan’s adaptation of George Orwell’s similarly dystopian 1984. Parallels can also be drawn with the tensions between artists and the government in the UK and all over the world.
• In Britain, all plays had to be sanctioned by the Lord Chamberlain until the passing of the Theatre Act of 1968. The London premiere of the musical Hair was postponed until the act was passed.
• Sam Holcroft’s inspiration for the play was a government-sanctioned trip to North Korea in 2011. In an interview in The Guardian, Holcroft called the experience “a piece of theatre like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
• A Mirror marks Jonny Lee Miller’s first London stage appearance since his performance in Frankenstein at the National Theatre in 2011, in which he and Benedict Cumberbatch alternated as Frankenstein and the Creature. In 2019, he appeared in James Graham’s Ink at the Manhattan Theatre Club.