On January 4 and 5, Julian Sands returns to the TNL following his celebration of Harold Pinter last season. This time he will direct Neil Dickson in Stephen Wyatt’s one-man show The Standard Bearer and also perform a solo piece titled Keats, Shelly, Ghosts and Lovers.  

The Standard Bearer, which first premiered in London in 2011, showcases the trials and tribulations of a Shakespearean actor in West Africa who is sent out on a cultural tour of local communities. The TNL has said that “the flurry of the situational mixed with Shakespeare’s words unintentionally shifts to become a more and more saturated confessional.”

Later in January, and continuing into early February, acclaimed local director Anne Simon directs a co-production with the Circle Theatre New York. Strangers, written by Isaac Bush and Sloane Bradford, follows 2015’s Hansel and Gretel co-production with the same team. The play centres on a fugitive who arrives on an abandoned island and the strange people he encounters. It “explores themes of connection, choice and mortality as they relate to modern threats of climate change, surveillance, the spread of disease and the fears of a rapidly changing world.”

In December, a double-bill of contemporary operas--Toshio Hosokawa’s The Raven (based on the poem by Edgar Allen Poe) and Christian Jost’s Heart Sutra--are performed with the United Instruments of Lucilin. Both will be performed in English with German surtitles.

The TNL has attracted a slew of fascinating productions in French and German and even Portuguese for the 2017-18 season. Highlights include French star of stage and screen Fanny Ardent in Le Navire Night, a one-off performance for voice and cello in October; Frank Hoffmann directing local actor Marco Lorenzini and others in a German adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella Notes From Underground; Frank Feitler directing Luc Feit in Georg Büchner’s Lenz; pianist Jean Muller teams up with Luxembourg’s finest actor André Jung for an evening examining Beethoven in February; and Sascha Ley plays and sings Judy Garland in Marion Poppenborg’s End Of The Rainbow in March and April.