The Good Hope

This article is about the Heijermans play. For the Heinesen novel, see The Good Hope (novel).

The Good Hope, a play written by Herman Heijermans in 1901, was translated in a new version for the Royal National Theatre, which relocated the action to the Yorkshire fishing community of Whitby in 1900, by Lee Hall, writer of the award-winning Billy Elliot and Spoonface Steinberg.

The voyage of The Good Hope is a journey on which the life of the entire community depends. A storm rages, the women and children wait ashore, the boat follows the Greenland catch. A Dutch classic of the social realist theatre.

Its original Dutch title is Op Hoop Van Zegen; it was translated into English and produced as early as 1903 and produced for the first time in England by the Stage Society on 26 April 1903. The very well known actress Miss Ellen Terry had it produced in all the leading towns of the English provinces and in the London suburbs in 1904 and 1905. On her American tour in 1906–07 the play was revived by her as it was later by The Pioneer Players on 3 November 1912. All this according to a letter of 10 May 1979 by Mrs. Anthony Thomas, curator of the Ellen Terry Museum, Tenterden, Kent.