Full cast announced for World Premiere of ‘Top Gs Like Me’

15 Jan

The brand new play by Samson Hawkins is a biting comic satire, interrogating the influence of online culture and the pull of toxic masculinity. Directed by Jesse Jones (Breaking the Code), Top Gs Like Me will be staged at the Royal & Derngate in Northampton, where the auditorium will be transformed into a skatepark with audiences seated in the round.

Top Gs Like Me threads satirical humour through the story of a group of rudderless young adults. It centres on the sometimes dangerous, coercive relationships that young people can have with digital algorithms and with influential figures who curry ideological favour with people on the cusp of adulthood, getting to them via the quick endorphins and short-cut culture of poisonous social media.

The full cast includes Fanta Barrie (The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs), Emily Coates (Ladhood), Danny Hatchard (EastEnders), Daniel Rainford (The Mousetrap), Finn Samuels (Twisted! The Musical) and David Schaal (The Inbetweeners).

The cast will be joined by a community chorus, the ‘internet ensemble’, representing the online world on stage and made up of 25 third year acting students from the University of Northampton.

Jesse Jones, Artistic Director, Royal & Derngate, Northampton said: “It brings me so much pride to be platforming urgent new writing on our largest stage, transforming our Derngate auditorium into Northampton’s Radlands Plaza skatepark, reconfiguring it for a capacity of 800. Big, bold and brave, Samson’s bitingly funny play doesn’t pull any punches. It is provocative and painfully funny, bringing the addictive and dark world of social media shorts and reels onto the stage. I am so excited to work with this incredible creative team and cast to smash this inherently theatrical world out of our screens and into three dimensions, encouraging our audience to ask how the algorithm is affecting us all.”

The creative team includes Set & Costume Design by Rebecca Brower (Peaky Blinders - The Rise), lighting design by Rory Beaton (For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy), sound design by Benjamin Grant (Death of England), and movement direction is by Monica Nicolaides (Rigoletto). The casting director is Kristian Wall and dramaturgy is by Lauren Mooney (More Life).