Edward Watson to star in Arthur Pita’s A Hunger Artist at the Young Vic
The former Royal Ballet principal plays Kafka’s fasting showman, locked in a straw-lined cage, with the cabaret star Meow Meow as the Impresario and live music by Frank Moon.
Edward Watson is going back to Kafka. The former Royal Ballet principal will play the title role in A Hunger Artist, Arthur Pita‘s reimagining of Franz Kafka’s short story, at the Young Vic next summer. The Australian performance artist Meow Meow will play the Impresario, with live music by Frank Moon.
The production reunites Pita and Watson after their Olivier Award-winning dance adaptation of The Metamorphosis. The Young Vic announced it today as one of four new shows completing the 2026/7 season of its Artistic Director and CEO, Nadia Fall.
A cage lined with straw
In Kafka’s tale, the Hunger Artist is shut in a locked, straw-lined cage and fasts for up to 40 days. The Impresario takes command of the stage, inviting the audience to witness this extraordinary “art” – and their own morbid curiosity. The theatre describes the piece as a mix of dance, song and Weimar-style cabaret that explores sacrifice, obsession and “the relentless pursuit of perfection”. Audiences will stand and move around during the performance.
The show was originally commissioned by the Cultural Programme at the University of Oxford, produced in association with The Royal Ballet and the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, and first performed at the Old Fire Station in Oxford on 3 June 2024.
Pita said he and his collaborators were “absolutely thrilled” to have been invited to bring the production to the Young Vic. “It’s strange. It’s visceral. It’s profoundly human,” he said. There were, he added, many layers to Kafka’s story, and he couldn’t wait for audiences to discover them, be entertained and astonished by them, and “perhaps see the story in an entirely new light”.
Fall picked out the show as the latest collaboration between Pita, the “prolific dancer” Watson and the “Australian cabaret star” Meow Meow. She said the four new titles had been chosen to offer something unexpected, describing them as theatre that is “literally and figuratively ‘outside the box’”.
Moon composed the score and wrote the lyrics with Meow Meow, and the text is by Meow Meow and Pita. Charlotte MacMillan designs the costumes and Christopher Swain the lighting.
The rest of the season
The other three new shows are Milo Rau and Servane Dècle’s The Pelicot Trial, a one-off piece of documentary theatre drawn from the Gisèle Pelicot case and performed by 30 actors and public figures in The Chamber at London County Hall on 30 November; DARKFIELD’s Eulogy, performed in complete darkness in a shipping container outside the theatre on The Cut (24 March – 24 April 2027); and FlawBored’s dark satire What’s the F**king Point? in The Maria (2–24 April 2027).
Dates and booking
A Hunger Artist is at The Maria, Young Vic, London, from 9 to 26 June 2027.
General booking opens on 7 October youngvic.org
Graham Spicer, aka ‘Gramilano’, is a writer, director and photographer based in Milan. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy. His articles have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the Danza in Italia column for Dancing Times magazine. Graham was the historical advisor on Codice Carla, the 2023 documentary on Italian ballerina Carla Fracci.
Graham also works as a dance photographer, and his photos have appeared in many books, theatre programmes, and magazines, including Dancing Times, Dance Spirit and Ballet2000, as well as all the major Italian newspapers.
He is a member of the Dance Section of The Critics’ Circle.
