Director John R Wilkinson and actor Robin Simpson in the rehearsal room for York Theatre Royal’s premiere of Catherine Dyson’s The Last Picture: James Drury
IN the first York Theatre Royal production to be made for the Studio since 2019, associate director John R Wilkinson directs Robin Simpson in The Last Picture from February 5 to 14.
After his sixth season as the Theatre Royal pantomime dame in Sleeping Beauty – and confirmed already for a seventh winter in Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs – Robin will swap the dame’s frocks and puns for the role of a dog in YTR, ETT and An Tobar & Mull Theatre’s world premiere co-production.
Robin will play an emotional support dog in Catherine Dyson’s 75-minute solo play, first performed in a reading at the Theatre Royal as one of 37 winning scripts selected from more than 2,000 entries by the Royal Shakespeare Company for its 37 Plays competition in 2023.
“We were given three of the plays to do in book-in-hand readings,” recalls John. “Juliet [creative director Juliet Forster] did one about MeToo ; Mingyu [resident artist Mingyu Lin] Lin directed one about immigration and diaspora. Then, by default, I was given this one – and I lucked out because The Last Picture was the best play.
“Part of the deal is that the writer comes up to see the reading. Catherine is an actress from Swansea – one of her main roles was playing the ‘woman in black’ in The Woman In Black, the role that’s never credited in the programme! – and she’s branched out into writing plays.
“She and I really connected over my love of European theatre – bare-bones abstract work – that leans into a storytelling in collaboration with the audience, where there’s very little in terms of set and design elements and instead the audience is encouraged to conjure the play for themselves.”
Dyson’s monodrama invites you to imagine yourself in a theatre in 2026. Now picture yourself as a Year 9 student on a school trip, and then as a citizen of Europe in 1939 as history takes its darkest turn. While you imagine, emotional support dog Sam will be by your side to look after you and keep everyone safe in a play built around empathy, its power and limits and what it asks of us. In a nutshell, The Last Picture explores our shared past, our present, and the choices we face today.
“For context, Catherine has Jewish heritage,” says John. “Her grandfather escaped persecution just before everything happened in Poland, escaping over the Tatra Mountains, so there’s a personal connection with this story.”
In a novel theatrical conceit, “Catherine was interested in telling the story through the eyes of a dog”, says John, in a device where Robin does not come on dressed as a dog but gives voice to what the dog is seeing and experiencing.
Robin says: “Pretty much straightaway it’s made clear that it’s being told by a dog, where we’re asking the audience to go on a journey of the imagination, when the story is told through a series of pictures created in language.”
John rejoins: “There are only one or two, very clear, stage directions by Catherine, but one was that there should be no actual pictures: they should all be created in the audience’s imagination.”
The production will lean into folklore and ritual. “The play is really fascinating in that we’re operating on several different levels. Firstly, I’m telling a story where I’m asking the audience to accept that I’m a dog, who’s part of a group of Year 19 pupils – aged 13, 14 – as their emotional support on a museum visit,” says Robin.
“Then I ask the audience to be the pupils, so they’re very much part of the story, sometimes in the story with me, and at other points we’re asking them to empathise with the people in the pictures created through language, because it’s a play about empathy and humanity.”
Robin continues: “I think the reason Catherine chose the dog’s point of view is that the dog can say dispassionately what’s going on in the pictures without having that human connection to the story, so the audience can make up their own mind.
“In finding the voice for the dog, it has to be about a balance between telling the story and colouring the story with emotion without performing it.”
John adds: “It’s such a clever form of storytelling that Catherine has leant into. One thing we said is that it’s not an animal study, but the dog gives the storytelling comfort and warmth.”
At the beginning, there is a description of how dogs have the ability to absorb human emotions without understanding them. “The dog picks up on the children’s emotions of being affected by what they’re seeing without the dog understanding why,” says Robin.
“What Catherine has done really cleverly is that there a lot of sticky political situations going on in the world that she doesn’t directly refer to,” says John. “But in terms of what she’s asking the audience to do, she doesn’t give a political viewpoint but she lets you sit and reflect on how it relates to what’s happening now.”
The Last Picture, York Theatre Royal Studio, February 5 to 14, except February 8, 7.45pm plus 2pm, February 7, 11 and 14. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.