Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Lyric Hammersmith
- Opens: Thursday, 17 June 2027 -
Booking until: Saturday, 17 July 2027
Before the Coffee Gets Cold description
Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a new stage adaptation by Conor McPherson of Toshikazu Kawaguchi's bestselling novel about a café where customers can travel through time.
In a narrow back alley in Tokyo, the café Funiculi Funicula offers its customers the chance to travel to a moment of their choosing, as long as they follow its rules: they cannot leave their seat, nothing they do in the past will change the present, and they must return before their coffee gets cold. In the novel, the café's staff look on as customers take that chance, among them a woman hoping to mend things with a boyfriend who has moved abroad, a nurse searching for a letter from her husband and a woman who has been avoiding her own sister.
The play receives its world premiere at the Lyric Hammersmith. Kawaguchi's story began life as a stage play in 2010 before he turned it into a novel in 2015. Geoffrey Trousselot's English translation was published in the UK in 2019, and the book has since been followed by several sequels and adapted into a 2018 Japanese film, Cafe Funiculi Funicula.
The adaptation is by Conor McPherson, the Irish playwright and director whose play The Weir won the Olivier Award for Best Play in 1999 and transferred from the Royal Court to the West End and Broadway. His other plays include Shining City, The Seafarer and The Night Alive, and he wrote and directed the musical Girl from the North Country, built around the songs of Bob Dylan.
Book tickets for the world premiere of a time-travel story about second chances and the conversations we wish we had had.
