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Since Quentin Tarantino announced last year that he had written his first play, it has remained as mysterious as the contents of Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction. But on Wednesday it was announced that the play, which Tarantino will also direct in London, is to be a “rambunctious comedy of deception and disguise” set in 1830s Europe.
According to publicity material, The Popinjay Cavalier is inspired by the “swashbuckling epics of stage and screen” and is a “sweeping celebration of theatre and its heightened romance, told with Tarantino’s signature style and unmistakable wit”. Rumours recently circulated that the play would be a “classic British trouser-dropping” farce. The Popinjay Cavalier, presented by Sonia Friedman Productions and Sony Pictures Entertainment, will be developed this year with a planned opening date of early 2027 in a West End theatre yet to be announced.
In an interview last year with the podcast The Church of Tarantino, the director confirmed that the play was “absolutely my next project” and suggested that if it was a success in the West End, there would also be a tour. “If it’s a flop, I’ll be done very quickly,” he added. Tarantino, who now lives in Tel Aviv, said he would move to England with his family to work on the play and that it would take up 18-24 months of his life.
The Popinjay Cavalier will be the playwriting debut of the film-maker, who became a novelist in 2021 with a version of his 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, published by HarperCollins. That was his ninth and most recent film as a director and he has said that he will bow out after directing his 10th. Tarantino has written a sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood called The Adventures of Cliff Booth, directed by David Fincher for Netflix. A taster from the film was broadcast among the Super Bowl adverts and trailers in February. The director’s two-part revenge thriller Kill Bill was released as one mammoth movie, with several tweaks and additions, late last year.
Although new to theatre, the director and noted cineaste has already proved a master at concentrating on single, claustrophobic interiors such as the stagecoach lodge in The Hateful Eight (2015), which drew comparisons to The Mousetrap playwright Agatha Christie.
The Popinjay Cavalier is not quite the first taste of Tarantino in a London theatre. In 2023, Riverside Studios presented the production Tarantino Live which, wrote Guardian critic Ryan Gilbey, mashed together the director’s films and their soundtracks “to create a megamix of songs, speeches and severed ears”.
Casting for the play has not yet been announced. In recent months, Tarantino has made headlines for publicly criticising Paul Dano as a “weak, uninteresting guy” and saying that his Pulp Fiction star Rosanna Arquette showed “a decided lack of class” when she expressed distaste at his use of the N-word in that film.
