With a Season of New Works, the Old Vic Is 200 Years Young

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LONDON — An adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” by Jack Thorne (“Let the Right One In,” “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,”), starring Rhys Ifans. A new two-part play, “The Divide,” by Alan Ayckbourn. The stage premiere of Ingmar Bergman’s 1982 film, “Fanny and Alexander.” A musical dance production, “Sylvia,” directed by Kate Prince, about the female rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst.

New work is the theme of the Old Vic’s 2017-18 season, announced on Tuesday, ahead of the theater’s 200th birthday on May 11, 2018.

To honor the Old Vic, Matthew Warchus, its artistic director, said in a statement, “We are celebrating it partly as a treasured historic icon but mostly as an adventurous, youthful, hub of creativity with a vibrant future ahead of it.”

Mr. Thorne’s version of “A Christmas Carol” will open the season, on Nov. 20, followed by Mr. Ayckbourn’s “The Divide,” which had its premiere at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, and is set in a gender-partitioned future society.

The Academy Award-winning “Fanny and Alexander,” adapted by Stephen Beresford and directed by Max Webster, is — at its full five-hour version — one of the longest fiction films made. Mr. Warchus said in an interview with The Evening Standard that while the show would be “quite meaty,” it would have a “normal playing time.” He added that the story of “Fanny and Alexander” — about two siblings whose lives change when their mother remarries — was not unlike “Matilda the Musical,” in that “attempts to bully the imagination out of a child result in the imagination growing stronger and stronger.”

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Other productions to be staged during the 2017-18 season include the premiere of “Mood Music” by Joe Penhall, who wrote the book for the West End musical “Sunny Afternoon” and created the new Netflix series “Mindhunter. ” An adaptation of Patrick Ness’s novel, “A Monster Calls,” about a young boy coping with his mother’s terminal cancer, directed by Sally Cookson, will come to the stage, after it was made into a movie last year.

The Old Vic also announced seven new associate artists, including the writers Mr. Thorne, Mr. Beresford, Conor McPherson, Tamsin Oglesby and Lucy Prebble, and the composer Claire van Kampen, whose “Farinelli and the King” will come to Broadway in December.

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