The Humans, Hampstead Theatre

After a quadruple Tony Award-winning Broadway run, Stephen Karam’s real-time, dark, family comedy The Humans transfers to the Hampstead Theatre this August for a highly anticipated UK premiere.

The play – which the New York Times describes as a ‘piercingly funny, bruisingly sad comedy-drama about an American family teetering on the edge of the abyss’ – comes complete with the original Broadway cast, including Reed Birney (House of Cards) as Erik Blake and Jayne Houdyshell as Deidre Blake, both of whom received Tony Awards in 2016 for their performances.

As three generations of the Blake family assemble for Thanksgiving in Brigid (Sarah Steele) and Richard’s (Arian Moayed) ramshackle and sparsely furnished pre-war apartment, the audience is offered a seat at the table. As the play unfolds, so do the worries plaguing their lives. Despite their best intentions, their personal and political woes cannot be suppressed, and the precarious situation of their country becomes increasingly evident.

The play is guided through the personal and the political, through light and shade and everything in between, by director Joe Mantello, whose astounding directorial range – spanning from blockbuster, pop musical Wicked to a one-man adaptation of David Sedaris’s comic essay The Santaland Diaries, makes him the perfect candidate for this bitter-sweet exposé of the human condition.