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An R&D presentation of a new interpretation of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This took place on 27 August 2025 at The Place Studios in London, following a three-week rehearsal process. The cast included Chrissy Brooke (Dr Semmelweis, An American in Paris), James Burman (Red Light Winter, North of Providence), Tom Byrne (The Crown, Dmitry, Prime Target), Mariano Zamora González (Studio Wayne McGregor), and Martin Sarreal (Bridgerton, Tammy Faye).

This reimagining of Burn This placed grief, transformation, and survival at the center of the play, treating Robbie’s absence as an active presence in the lives of those left behind. The production foregrounded Anna’s agency and her struggle to reclaim an artistic and emotional life after loss, while placing her private experience of grief within the larger anxiety of our contemporary climate crisis: a world confronting irreversible loss and the question of what can survive it.

Drawing on the ancient Greek association of the butterfly with psyche—both soul and butterfly—the production used the butterfly as a recurring image of mortality, metamorphosis, and renewal. Movement, original music, and spatial dramaturgy extended these ideas beyond the spoken text.

The script references an unfinished twelve-minute dance that Anna and Robbie had been creating together before Robbie’s death, but the work itself is never seen. This R&D marked the first known interpretation in the play’s nearly forty-year production history to bring that dance to life and incorporate it into Anna’s dramaturgical trajectory. Presented as the penultimate moment of the play, Anna completes the work in Robbie’s memory, transforming grief into an act of creation and remembrance. In doing so, the dance gave dramatic weight to the decision Anna makes in the play’s final moments.

This interpretation approached Burn This not simply as a love story, but as an exploration of what—and who—survives after irreversible loss.

The R&D was presented with permission from Creative Artists Agency.

SYNOPSIS

The play is set in a Manhattan loft shared by Anna, a young dancer-choreographer, and her two gay roommates—Robbie, her collaborator who has just died in a freak boating accident, and Larry, a world-weary, caustically funny advertising executive.

As the story begins, Anna returns from Robbie’s funeral, comforted by her well-meaning boyfriend Burton, a successful screenwriter. Then Robbie’s older brother, Pale, arrives to collect his brother’s belongings—but ends up transforming the lives of everyone in the loft.