The Night of January 16th

Ayn Rand’s The Night of January 16th is a theatrical curiosity: part courtroom drama, part moral debate, and part social experiment. Inspired by the real-life death of Swedish industrialist Ivar Kreuger, the play is set entirely in a courtroom during a murder trial — with an unusual twist: members of the audience are chosen to play the jury, and the verdict changes every night.

Karen Andre — once the brilliant secretary and mistress of powerful Swedish financier Bjorn Faulkner — stands accused of his murder after he fell fifty stories from the penthouse they once shared. The trial is fuelled by ambition, seduction, betrayal, and competing versions of the truth. It is not only the accused who is on trial — it is the values of the society judging her.

Rand wrote the play in 1934, when she was in her late twenties — years before The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged would make her one of the most debated philosophers of the twentieth century. Her philosophy of Objectivism — the belief in rational self-interest, individual achievement, and the moral right to live for oneself rather than for others — runs underneath everything she wrote, including this courtroom drama. Karen Andre is not simply a woman on trial. She is a woman who refused to compromise, and Rand asks the audience to decide whether that makes her guilty or heroic.

For Hema, this production had a particular resonance. Reading The Fountainhead as a teenager — Rand’s story of an uncompromising architect who refuses to dilute his vision for anyone — shaped the way she understands design: as something with integrity, not just function. Working on Rand’s own play decades later felt like a full circle moment.

Directed by veteran theatre maker Johann van der Merwe, the production ran at the Milnerton Playhouse in February 2026. Hema served as production designer, production manager, lighting and sound designer and operator — building a world of deliberate austerity, where every technical element existed in service of the drama, and the tension in the room did the rest.