Lenya

New York, 1979. Academy Award-nominated singer and film star Lotte Lenya (The Threepenny Opera, From Russia With Love) conjures the ghost of her husband, composer Kurt Weill, as she reflects on their life, their art, and the impossible contradictions of love.

Confession, cabaret and commemoration combine in this brand new operatic musical drama starring Olivier and Grammy Award-winning Rosalind Plowright (Mary Stuart and Not the Messiah Monty Python) as Lenya, befalling a late-night reckoning with memory, guilt and song.

From the slums of Vienna to Broadway stardom, from exile under Nazism to late-life loneliness, Lenya and Weill relive their love story in music. With Weill at the piano and Lenya centre stage, they sing, argue, dance, remember — and try, one last time, to understand each other.

As Lenya prepares to say goodbye — not only to Weill, but to performing itself — she questions what it means to survive, to be remembered, and to truly belong. Raw, witty, painful and defiantly alive, Lenya is an intimate portrait of love in a time of chaos, and music as the one thing that endures.

Be the first to see this compelling new Mayflower co-production.

A new work by Tamsin Treverton Jones, music by Kurt Weill, lighting design by Ken Billington, costume design by Sue Simmerling, movement by Morgan Young and directed by Thomas Guthrie.