These New Puritans’ Jack Barnett To Score Brave New World Play

Jack Barnett, driving force behind the chimerical These New Puritans, has been revealed as the musical director for the first authorised stage production of Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World. Huxley's 1931 masterpiece of speculative fiction has remained in the public eye since first published, and it's ruminations on class, sex, society and narcotics are as pertinant now as ever before, as Barnett noted in a short statement:

“We’re really pleased to be involved with Brave New World. I don’t think we could have picked something more suitable if we’d had a million options. Re-reading it, I could imagine our sounds and the contrasts in our sounds mapping onto it well. It should be a blast, having a chance to produce some of the sounds which are only described. It’s probably the most prophetic of twentieth century dystopias, and especially powerful given the undercurrent of scientism around at the moment. Ultimately it deals with more fundamental questions, like what is happiness, and at what cost? And that’s got to be the only game in town."

Adapted by award winning playwright Dawn King and directed by James Dacre, Brave New World premieres at Royal and Derngate, Northampton, where it runs from 4 to 26 September 2015. It then tours to Edinburgh, Blackpool, Nottingham, Cheltenham, Wolverhampton, Darlington and Bradford where it concludes on 5 December. Tickets for the Northampton run are available from here, starting at a very reasonable tenner.