Edward Watson and Meow Meow will star in A Hunger Artist in the Maria at the Young Vic from 9-26 June 2027, directed and choreographed by Arthur Pita.
A Hunger Artist will run in the Maria at the Young Vic from 9-26 June 2027, with press night on 11 June 2027. It is one of four productions announced today to complete the theatre’s 2026/27 season.
Former Royal Ballet principal Edward Watson plays the Hunger Artist. The international performance artist Meow Meow plays the Impresario. Arthur Pita directs and choreographs, and Frank Moon provides live music. The production is created by Pita, Meow Meow, Moon and Watson, and is billed as a spectacle after Franz Kafka.
Kafka’s story concerns a performer who fasts for up to forty days in a locked, straw-lined cage while an audience watches. The staging uses dance, song and cabaret, and audiences stand and move around the performance rather than sitting. Pita and Watson previously worked together on the Olivier Award-winning dance adaptation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
Creative credits are costume design by Charlotte MacMillan, lighting design by Christopher Swain, music by Frank Moon with lyrics by Moon and Meow Meow, and text by Meow Meow and Arthur Pita.
The production was originally commissioned by The Cultural Programme, University of Oxford, and first performed at The Old Fire Station, Oxford on 3 June 2024. It was produced by the Cultural Programme in association with The Royal Ballet and the Oxford Kafka Research Centre.
Arthur Pita said: “We are absolutely thrilled to have been invited by the Young Vic to present our production of A Hunger Artist. It’s strange. It’s visceral. It’s profoundly human. There are so many layers to Kafka’s story, and I can’t wait for audiences to discover them, be entertained and astonished by them, and perhaps see the story in an entirely new light.”
Booking opens at 11am on 1 October for Patrons+, with Good Friends from 5 October and Friends from 6 October, and general booking from 11am on 7 October. A Hunger Artist runs in the Maria at the Young Vic from 9-26 June 2027.
