Following the success of SILENCE! the Musical, Above the Stag Theatre turns its attention to something very different - a theatrical adaptation of EM Forster's classic novel, Maurice - a story of passion, bravery and defiance set against the repressive and hypocritical attitudes of Edwardian England.

It's also a story of identity and expectation. Maurice's future is mapped out from childhood. Only when he goes to Cambridge does he start to question the expectations imposed upon him - by his family, by the British class system, by a restrictive society and by the legal and social taboos around homosexuality.

His personal struggle to recognise his true self and accept 'the love that dare not speak its name' nearly breaks him. But this is more than a gay coming-of-age story. It explores our deepest insecurities - the need to fit in, having the courage to stand out and suddenly seeing society from the outside.

The play will be directed by Tim McArthur the resident director at Above the Stag who was assistant on Silence! and whose previous directing credits include Casanova, Blink!, Coloured Lights, Obama on my Mind, and the European Premiere of Jack Heifner's Seduction. The cast includes Laura Armstrong whose West End credits include A Little Night Music, and Jonathan Hansler who has performed as Peter Cook in Pete'n'Me (New End) and recently Pete'n'Dud in the Afterlife (Leicester Square Theatre).

Maurice was written almost a century ago in 1914 but unpublishable until 50 years later in 1971, a year after Forster died and only 4 years after the legalisation of homosexuality. It was an intensely personal tale which, during his lifetime, he shared only with trusted friends, including D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, and Paul Cadmus. The final happy ending where Maurice and his lover 'walk off into the sunset together' flew in the face of contemporary expectation then and even in 1971 when it was published.