Lucy McCormick takes the title role in the UK premiere of Lauren Yee’s Mother Russia, with Samuel Creasey, Kirsty Rider and Matthew Tennyson completing the four-strong company at Hampstead Downstairs this winter.
Lucy McCormick, whose credits include Are You Watching at the Royal Court, will play the title role in Mother Russia when the American playwright Lauren Yee’s comedy reaches the UK for the first time at Hampstead Theatre in December. The venue named its full company this morning.
Samuel Creasey, who was named Most Promising Newcomer at the Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, plays Dimitri; his stage work includes The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe. Matthew Tennyson, whose Hampstead credits include The Invention of Love, is Evgeny, and Kirsty Rider, part of the company of Further Than The Furthest Thing at the Young Vic, completes the cast as Katya.
The play opens in St Petersburg in 1992, with the Soviet order collapsing and a new market economy flooding the city with fast food, imported novelties and more brands of everything than anyone asked for. Evgeny and Dimitri, two friends at the start of adult life, decide the surest money is in surveillance and protection rackets. Their first assignment is to listen in on Katya, a young woman with a past in the West, and Evgeny finds himself falling for the very person he is being paid to eavesdrop on.
Yee’s play comes to London after a well-received run at Signature Theater in New York earlier this year. Her other work includes Cambodian Rock Band and The Great Leap, and she describes Mother Russia as the latest in a run of plays about twentieth-century communism in Asia and its collision with Western pop culture. “To me, Mother Russia is a wild ride through early 90s Russia that’s a mirror for the topsy turvy world we live in today,” she said. “I cannot wait to see how the irreverent humour and unexpected guts of the piece lands in the UK with this incredible team.”
Greg Ripley-Duggan, Hampstead’s producer and chief executive, called the play “elegantly constructed, highly intelligent, topical, and very, very funny”, adding: “When I read it earlier this year I immediately thought it would sit perfectly alongside Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers on the Main Stage, so I am thrilled Lauren has allowed us to produce the UK premiere in this seasonal slot.” The company for that Stoppard revival, led by Rhea Norwood and James Corrigan, was announced last week.
Director Oscar Toeman makes his Hampstead debut with the production, following recent work on a UK tour of Double Indemnity, an Old Vic tour of Hundred Feet Tall and Farewell Mr Haffman at Park Theatre. His creative team is designer Alys Whitehead, lighting designer Jamie Platt and sound designer Max Pappenheim.
Mother Russia runs at Hampstead Downstairs from Friday 11 December 2026 to Saturday 30 January 2027, with press night on Thursday 17 December 2026.
