Oscar Winner Danny Boyle to Direct Frankenstein at the National

Oscar winner Danny Boyle is set to direct a new version of Frankenstein at the National Theatre, Artistic Director Nicholas Hytner announced. Other highlights of the new season include productions of Women Beware Women, Welcome to Thebes, Danton’s Death, Hamlet and a celebration of Peter Hall’s 80th birthday.

Boyle began his career as a theater director before making a name for himself with such films as Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire. He will make his National Theatre debut directing Frankenstein. The new play is by Nick Dear (who won a BAFTA in 1996 for his TV adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion) and based on the novel by Mary Shelley. The production is slated for 2011.

Other upcoming NT highlights include Dion Boucicault's London Assurance, starring Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw; William Shakespeare's Hamlet, starring Rory Kinnear and Clare Higgins; and Broadway vets Harriet Walter and Samuel Barnett starring in Marianne Elliott’s production of Thomas Middleton’s Jacobean tragedy Women Beware Women. The season will also feature a new play by Moira Buffini, Welcome to Thebes, directed by Richard Eyre; the previously reported Michael Grandage production of Georg Buchner’s Danton’s Death by Georg Buchner, starring Toby Stephens; an Andrew Upton-helmed production of Mikhail Bulgakov's The White Guard; Terrence Rattigan's After the Dance, directed by Thea Sharrock, Sir Peter Hall directing his daughter Rebecca Hall as Viola in Twelfth Night and many other offerings.