Naomi Sorkin

The Playground Theatre presents Ida Rubinstein: The Final Act, with Naomi Sorkin – former ballerina with the American Ballet Theatre – in the role of Ida.  

The season includes Well Made @ The Playground – a mini-season of new theatre, opera, and contemporary dance from developing artists – and Ida Rubinstein: The Final Act, a play with music and dance that chronicles the untold story of dance’s Forgotten Diva. 

From Paris to Palestine, from dancing in the Ballet Russes to commissioning Ravel's Boléro, Ida Rubinstein's career as a dancer and impresario saw her working with artists such as Diaghilev, Nijinsky and Debussy. But despite her varied career and her fame in her own time, her name is all but forgotten whilst her contemporaries live on in memory. Now Naomi Sorkin, an actor and former ballerina recounts the Russian heiress' dramatic life: her scandalous Salomé that lead her embarrassed family to commit her to an asylum, her rise to the heights of fame in Paris, her bisexual love affairs, the assassination of her long-time lover Lord Moyne, and her work as a nurse in both World Wars. Ida Rubinstein: The Final Act combines text, movement, music, projections and film to evoke a long-gone era of theatrical extravagance.

The Playground Theatre's 2020 season foregrounds the work of female playwrights, directors and creatives with a wide-reaching programme of theatre and dance. Stand out productions include a play about the life of Ida Rubinstein, a dancer with Diaghilev's Ballet Russes who fearlessly courted controversy. Later in the Spring, Joshua Sobel's Sinners comes to the theatre in a production directed by the award-winning actor Brian Cox and starring Nicole Ansari. The season also features Mum, the story of caring for an elderly relative with dementia, and Fragments, another show combining themes of memory, history and how we (re)write the past.