Katniss Everdeen is coming to a stage near you. Five-time Tony nominee and The Girl from the North Country playwright Conor McPherson is adapting the first novel of Suzanne Collins’s smash hit young adult dystopian series The Hunger Games for the stage. The play, based on both the book and the Lionsgate film starring Jennifer Lawrence, will mark the first-ever live stage adaptation of the franchise with a full production headed to the West End.
Matthew Dunster, the London director behind plays including 2:22 – A Ghost Story, Hangmen, and The Pillowman, will helm the production with a “world class creative team” that includes set designer Miriam Buether, costume designer Moi Tran, and choreographer Charlotte Broom. The stage adaptation has the blessing of Collins, who penned the four-novel Hunger Games franchise.
“I’m very excited to be collaborating with the amazing team of Conor McPherson and Matthew Dunster as they bring their dynamic and innovative interpretation of The Hunger Games to the London stage,” said Collins in a press release.
The announcement of a stage play comes ahead of the Hunger Games’s return to the mainstream with the film adaptation of the fourth book in the series, the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, hitting theaters November 17. Directed by Hunger Games franchise auteur Francis Lawrence and starring West Side Story’s Rachel Zegler, Euphoria’s Hunter Schaefer, and Oscar winner Viola Davis, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes follows events that transpired sixty-four years before the first novel to a young Coriolanus Snow, well before he becomes the cold and calculating dictator found in The Hunger Games trilogy.
The Hunger Games isn’t the only major franchise getting a British stage adaptation. The Duffer Brothers announced that a stage adaptation of Netflix’s Stranger Things, a prequel play titled Stranger Things: The First Shadow, is in development and headed to the Phoenix Theater in the West End in late 2023. Both are following in the footsteps of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a theatrical brand extension that debuted in London in 2016 before moving to Broadway in 2018, where it’s still playing.
