Birmingham Rep-watchers alarmed by the theatre's apparent populist drift in recent months can look forward to Shakespeare, Brecht and Chekhov in the coming nine months.
True, the Shakespeare is Romeo and Juliet with a big education package attached, but Bill Bryden is directing, a heady pace is promised and so are cuts for some of Shakespeare's duller passages. The Brecht is The Life of Galileo in a new version by David Edgar, with the Rep's artistic director Jonathan Church directing and Timothy West in the title role.
"I've long had a thought that Brecht would connect with this space, and David and I had been talking for some time about what to do," Church told me when we met last week to talk about the new season.
"Galileo is in many ways his most straightforward play - it was nearly made into a film and it has a conventional linear narrative which rather goes against Brecht's beliefs. I'm thrilled to be doing it."
Of course, it won't be overlooked that Brecht's play is about the suppression of free speech by religious bigotry, a theme much on Rep minds following the closure of Bezhti by Sikh rioters late last year.
"It had a huge impact because it means now we're always trying to second-guess what will or won't provoke a reaction," says Church, pointing out nevertheless that apparently sensitive plays like Chaos and Bells later passed off without incident.
Nor is he expecting any reaction to Shan Khan's Prayer Room, a coproduction with the Edinburgh Festival about a three-way struggle for prayer space between Jews, Christians and Muslims in a British college which bears an obvious parallel with the history of the Middle East. This opens in The Door on September 6.
Naturally Church doesn't necessarily agree with my assessment of recent main house productions (Neville's Island, On the Ceiling, Dracula, Don Quixote Rides Again) as middling-to-bad - except perhaps in the case of Dracula. He points out that summer programming has always tended to be lighter - which is true, though there is a significant difference in quality between, say, Neville's Island and last year's Noises Off.
But maybe I'm in a minority, because the Rep's box office has been playing a merry tune.
"It was a fantastic year for us in that sense," says Church. "But because we're trying to reach so many audiences now, trying to keep a sense of identity is harder, particularly in the main house.
"We are working very hard to put new work on the main stage, but it's meant that types of work come from very different sources. Most people don't come to the theatre more than two or three times a year, but for a more traditional theatregoer who is more used to coming regularly I think the diversity could be confusing."
So, from September the main stage offers Maureen Lipman in Peter Quilter's new musical Glorious! about renowned tone-deaf singer Florence Foster Jenkins, a revival of Wole Soyinka's early play The Lion and the Jewel, Romeo and Juliet, The Life of Galileo, Tristan & Yseult from fast-rising Cornish company Kneehigh (guest stars in the RSC's Complete Works festival next year), and the return of the The Wizard of Oz for Christmas.
The New Year adds the Almeida's acclaimed stage version of the Danish film classic Festen and Mustapha Matura's adaptation of Three Sisters to Trinidad, with the UB40 musical Promises and Liesfollowing in March.
Shows in The Door include a collaboration between Birmingham writer Peter Wynne-Willson and Korea's Hanyong Theatre Company, Tamsin Oglesby's new play Only the Lonely and Deborah Gearing's Rosalind: A Question of Life, about DNA scientist Rosalind Franklin, which runs in parallel with Galileo.
