The Last Picture
A play about empathy – its power, its limits, and what it asks of us.On a school trip in 2026, a group of Year 9 students – with Sam, their emotional support dog – are drawn into the story of 1939 Europe. As past and present blur, the play asks what it means to care, to remember, and to connect across time.
A thought-provoking exploration of empathy, imagination, and collective memory, The Last Picture tells the parallel stories of a contemporary school trip, and the unfolding horrors of the Holocaust, asking us to come together to witness, to listen, and to reflect.
Selected from over 2,000 entries for the RSC’s 37 Plays in 2023, a national playwriting project to create a new folio of brand new plays, Catherine Dyson’s The Last Picture leads audiences through time and space, from classrooms to museums, to moments where history shifts.
Director John R. Wilkinson reunites with ETT following his direction of Tonderai Munyevu’s Mugabe, My Dad and Me, which won Best New Play at the UK Theatre Awards in 2022.
This play was love at first sight for me. I could read it again and again. Generous, original and powerfully resonant.
Pippa Hill, RSC New Work Team
In Rehearsal
Photos: James Drury
