Barbican Centre announces today that Academy Award-nominated actor Ruth Negga will star in the world premiere of Quiet Songs by Finn Beames & Company, a new piece of music theatre for a single actor, a string quartet and an armoury of swords. As this year’s winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award, which supports the development of artists making experimental new work, the company’s prize-winning show receives a two-week run in the London venue’s intimate studio theatre, The Pit, as part of the Barbican Centre’s 2024 autumn programme. The production runs from 22 October to 2 November and tickets are on sale now, including £5 for 14-25 year olds with Young Barbican membership, via barbican.org.uk

Written, composed and directed by Finn Beames, Quiet Songs is an unflinching, semi-autobiographical portrait of adolescence. Told through a transfixing fusion of words, live music and meticulous staging, it follows what happens to a voice when it is cruelly pushed to breaking point, and how self-expression can be found beyond that.

A bullied teenager feels their voice breaking. Can it ever be fixed? In this coming-of-age tale about a young gay person seeking identity in an unkind world, musicians and their instruments become the storytellers. Sounding out the hidden depths of a human voice, the new show creates a beautifully unsettling world where string instruments are played with swords.

The profound meeting of sword and strings was developed from an initial research project in 2017, on a residency with the armoury department at the Royal Ballet and Opera. Working with musicians and the organisation’s Head Armourer, Zoe Phillips, Finn Beames found a way of expressing the uneasy fragility of a voice as it forms, and the fear and anxiety that is felt so acutely in teenage years.

Making her Barbican debut in the role of the teenage character simply known as Boy, Quiet Songs marks Ruth Negga’s first theatre performance in London since her 2011 appearance in the Irish classic, Playboy of the Western World (Old Vic). Across her prolific career, stage work includes her Ian Charleson rising star award-winning role in Phèdre opposite Helen Mirren (National Theatre), gender-blind Hamlet (The Gate, Dublin/ St Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn) and most recently a Tony Award nomination for her portrayal as Lady Macbeth (alongside Daniel Craig in the title role) on Broadway. Now based in LA, Ruth has continued to seek out opportunities which challenge whose stories are traditionally represented on stage and screen, including her Oscar nominated performance as Mildred Loving (Loving, 2017) and BAFTA and Golden Globe nominated role in Passing directed by Rebecca Hall (2021).

Alongside Boy, four onstage musicians include Fra Rustumji (violin), Chihiro Ono (viola), Hoda Jahanpour (cello) and Thea Sayer (double bass). Quiet Songs is written, directed and composed by Finn Beames, with Set and Costume Design by Samal Blak, Lighting Design by Bethany Gupwell and Sound Design by Tingying Dong 董汀滢. Zoe Phillips is the production’s Creative Armourer and Fight Direction is by Bret Yount.

Ruth Negga said:

“It’s so hard to make work without funding. This is not news. The support and encouragement from initiatives like the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award is needed and necessary. Especially for work that is original in all aspects of the word. Nurture, care and attention… the time and space to be brave… the opportunity to bet on one’s own originality… to risk authenticity. That all seems so in tune with what so much of Beckett and his work means to me”.

The vividness of Finn’s language struck me immediately. Not only because of its beauty lyrically and the sharpness of his imagery, but he is able to expertly and so fluidly locate the cruelty and the strange otherness of adolescence; a visceral, full body affair. How alien it can feel. How our bodies can be unreliable, vulnerable and often comical allies. The stakes are always high in our quest to belong, to be understood or at least to understand ourselves. But does anything ever actually feel as acute as it does in adolescence? 

I look forward to collaborating with Finn, the brilliant musicians and armourer indeed in creating a truly multisensory experience. And I am very much looking forward to working at the Barbican for the first time. I have admired it from near and far for many decades and its commitment to exploring the bold and the brave.” 

Finn Beames, Artistic Director of Finn Beames & Company, said:
“Ruth is bringing extraordinary talent and extraordinary compassion to this role. This collaboration is a gift. I immediately felt the material was safe in her hands, and at the same time knew she would illuminate it in ways I never imagined possible.

The starting point for this project was my own voice, but I think anyone will be able to relate to the story of Quiet Songs. Our voices carry so much of who we are; what we choose to display or hide, and that which can’t be hidden. This show is about powerful voices preying on quiet ones, and what it means to finally speak. I wanted to confront how difficult growing up can be, but still create something beautiful from the experience, an impulse I know will be especially recognisable to queer and disabled audiences.”