My Brilliant Friend Tickets for Theatre Shows in 2024/2025

World Premiere of a two-part dramatization of Elena Ferrante’s epic family saga. Adapted for the stage by April De Angelis and directed by Melly Still. Elena Ferrante’s intense portrait of an all-consuming female friendship in post-war Italy is brought to life for the first time on the Rose stage.

This modern family saga chronicles the lives of friends, Elena and Lila, following them from their childhoods in a poor, tough neighbourhood of Naples, through passionate love affairs, burgeoning careers and family struggles. But even as life repeatedly tries to pull the two in separate directions, Elena and Lila remain inextricably bound to one another.

A powerful story of love, violence, sex, ambition, genius and self-destruction, the two-part play is an exploration not just of female friendship and rivalry, but of Italy after the war and the decades of political turmoil and cultural change that followed.

Regarded as ‘one of the most exciting and compelling contemporary literary voices today’, Elena Ferrante was chosen this year as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people on the planet. Very little, however, is known about the author - she writes under a pseudonym, explaining: ‘Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing'. Her first novels were published in the early 1990s, with My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in the Neapolitan quartet, translated into English in 2012, and the final book in the quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize.