For a decade the American writer Lauren Yee has been building a cycle of plays around one collision: Communism in Asia meeting the noise of Western pop culture. Cambodian Rock Band and The Great Leap made her name on that fault line. Mother Russia moves the experiment west, into a city learning to shop, and Hampstead Theatre has now named the four actors who will carry it into its UK premiere.

Matthew Tennyson, last at Hampstead in The Invention of Love, plays Evgeny. Samuel Creasey, a Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards Most Promising Newcomer whose credits include The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Globe, is his friend Dmitri. Kirsty Rider (Further Than the Furthest Thing, Young Vic) plays Katya, and Lucy McCormick (Are You Watching, Royal Court) takes the title role. Oscar Toeman directs, making his Hampstead debut after Double Indemnity on a UK tour, Hundred Feet Tall for the Old Vic and Farewell, Mr Haffmann at the Park Theatre.

Mother Russia artwork with headshots of Samuel Creasey, Lucy McCormick, Kirsty Rider and Matthew Tennyson — Image: Hampstead Theatre

The play opens in St Petersburg in 1992. Capitalism is arriving with Filet-o-Fish, Latvian condoms and a bewildering choice of toothpastes, and two young men decide the fastest money lies in espionage and racketeering. Their first surveillance target is Katya, who has lived in the West and carries a history of her own. Evgeny falls for her at once, which leaves him with a problem no phrasebook covers: how do you confess your feelings to someone who doesn’t know you are listening to every word?

That question is the engine of the comedy, and it is a dramatist’s question. The audience knows what Katya does not, so every scene between them runs on dramatic irony, and the romance has to survive the asymmetry of information that also defines the new market around them. In the announcement, Yee calls the play “a wild ride through early 90s Russia that’s a mirror for the topsy turvy world we live in today”.

The London staging follows Signature Theatre’s Off-Broadway production earlier this year, directed by Teddy Bergman, where David Turner played Mother Russia opposite Steven Boyer, Adam Chanler-Berat and Rebecca Naomi Jones. In London the title role passes to a woman, which puts the motherland of the title in a different body. Greg Ripley-Duggan, Hampstead’s producer and chief executive, says he thought on first reading that it would sit beside Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers on the Main Stage, and calls it “elegantly constructed, highly intelligent, topical, and very, very funny”.

Hampstead Theatre building seen across the Swiss Cottage open space and fountain pool — Photo: Jim Osley via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Mother Russia plays Hampstead Downstairs from 11 December 2026 to 30 January 2027, with a press night on Thursday 17 December. Alys Whitehead designs, with lighting by Jamie Platt and sound by Max Pappenheim. Previews cost £10 and full-price seats £28 or £35, with £10 tickets for under-30s and students.

Two clever comedies under one roof this winter: Stoppard’s moral philosophers on the Main Stage, and downstairs a young spy discovering that the only honest thing he can say to the woman he loves is the one thing he cannot admit.

Tags: Hampstead Theatre, Kirsty Rider, Lauren Yee, Lucy McCormick, Matthew Tennyson, Mother Russia