Jessica Hynes and Reece Shearsmith are the last names added to White Rabbit Red Rabbit at the Duchess Theatre, each reading Nassim Soleimanpour's play cold on a single Monday night before the run closes on 14 December 2026.
Jessica Hynes, the double BAFTA winner known on screen for Spaced and W1A, takes the envelope in White Rabbit Red Rabbit at the Duchess Theatre on Monday 30 November 2026. It will be her first time on stage in more than five years.
Olivier nominee Reece Shearsmith, whose television work includes The League of Gentlemen and Inside No. 9, has the last word, on Monday 14 December 2026, the closing night of the 15th anniversary West End run.
The pair follow Olivia Cooke, of House of the Dragon and Slow Horses, who appears on Monday 23 November. Her date was confirmed in October, together with that of Joe Lycett, who performed on 2 November.
The rules of the piece have stayed the same since it was first performed in 2011. Each night a different performer walks out to find a sealed envelope holding a script they have never read. There is no director and no rehearsal, and nobody does it twice, so every performance turns on how that one person meets the material. Soleimanpour wrote the play at a time when he was not allowed to leave Iran, and it has now been given more than 4,000 times in over 25 languages, a meditation on obedience, choice and free expression that also tests the bargain between whoever is on stage and the people watching.
This London season is the first production from There & Then, the company Soleimanpour has set up with director Omar Elerian, whose credits include Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and Rhinoceros. It is presented in association with Nica Burns, with Roz Coleman as executive producer. Earlier Mondays have brought David Tennant, Jodie Whittaker, Riz Ahmed, Christopher Eccleston and Steve Pemberton to the stage, among many others.
The remaining performances of White Rabbit Red Rabbit are at 7.30pm on Monday evenings, with tickets from £25.
