Madame la Mort, The Hope Theatre
Running throughout January 2026, Write Club is The Hope Theatre’s premier festival of new writing, dedicated to showcasing bold stories and expansive ideas. Designed to breathe life into the London fringe during the winter months, the festival provides a vital platform for up to thirty selected shows to make their debut. Under the curation of Joint Artistic Directors Laurel Marks and Toby Hampton, Write Club fosters a collaborative community by offering playwrights and theatre-makers multi-night runs, professional venue support, and dedicated networking opportunities.
To showcase some of the shows taking place, we will be publishing Q&A interviews, starting today with director Rosie Morgan-Males talking about Madame La Mort, which will be playing on Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 Janaury, 7pm both days.
We will be publishing new interviews for Write Club 2026 throughout January. You’ll be able to find all those currently published here.
What can audiences expect from the show?
Madame la Mort is a queer, ultra-modern performance built from Rachilde’s experimental symbolist text, and reimagined through movement and recorded sound. It pulls us into a world where decadence becomes defence, and performance is the only thing keeping death at bay.
For Juliette, a recent graduate, life derails after a traumatic accident. A year later, she has transformed the flat she shares with her roommate Jamie into a late-19th-century Parisian salon. She has reconstructed her reality and identity to fit this vision of the past. The people closest to her come to intervene. Her ex-therapist Jack makes a final attempt to confront her morphine dependency, formed after the accident. Her girlfriend Lucie is struggling to hold their relationship together as Juliette disappears further into her imagination.
What they don’t know: Juliette has laced one cigarette in a pack with a lethal dose of morphine. She smokes them at random. Will it be today? The show lives in the tension between camp and catastrophe, symbolist excess and painfully modern burnout. It’s about queer fantasy, addiction, control, and the seductive idea that if you perform something hard enough, it might become true. If you’ve ever wanted to disappear into an aesthetic rather than deal with your inbox, this one’s for you.
Is Write Club going to be the show’s first time on stage, or have you already performed elsewhere?
Write Club will be Madame la Mort’s first time on stage, and we’re thrilled to premiere the work at The Hope – a theatre known for championing new writing and genuine artistic development. The piece was written in a writers’ room and shaped by a collective of emerging creatives across disciplines. It isn’t a polished artefact yet; it’s a work in motion. This showing is about pressure-testing ideas, tone, and theatrical language in real time.
Come for new writing, new voices, and the slightly unhinged joy of watching something figure itself out in front of you.
What was your inspiration behind the show?
This project began as a translation and contemporary adaptation of Rachilde’s 19th-century symbolist play, and has grown into a deeply collaborative and ethically rigorous creative process. From the outset, the piece has been shaped by a large interdisciplinary writers’ room made up of translators, playwrights, composers, dramaturgs and performers.
Rather than working from a single authorial voice, the team has built the text collectively, allowing multiple perspectives to inform the emotional, linguistic and structural layers of the adaptation. Rachilde is an fascinating yet overlooked artist. She was one of the first women in France to make a living from writing, moving in the same social circles as Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, Theophile Gautier and many other Victorian and Decadent thinkers. We wanted to spotlight her incredible work, moulding her exploration of gender, sexuality and the psyche into a modern context – highlighting the play’s contemporary relevance.
How important is audience interaction to you?
The production is being developed in conversation with audiences. Audience responses from our initial run as part of Write Club will directly shape the next iteration of the script. The aim is to place the text in front of diverse audiences at multiple stages of its evolution, allowing their responses to meaningfully guide the refinement of the work before a run at the Edinburgh Fringe in summer 2026.
If your show had a soundtrack, what songs would definitely be on it, and why?
Anything by Maurice Ravel! Our composers have taken his music as the base of much of their design, layering and disjoining it to create a fractured sonic atmosphere. And Amour Plastique by Videoclub, which is what the show reveals itself to be.
Thanks to Rosie for chatting to us about the play. You can catch it on Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 Janaury at The Hope Theatre.
