Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, will join forces with West End theatre owners Nimax Theatres to form a new company called Classic Spring, which will debut with a season of four Oscar Wilde plays.

In a statement, Nimax chief executive Nica Burns commented, “I am delighted to announce a new collaboration with former Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Dominic Dromgoole. Together, we are creating a new company, named Classic Spring, dedicated to celebrating the work of some of our greatest proscenium playwrights in the architecture that they wrote for, and exploring how the change that they effected in their own day still resonates today.”

The season will launch in October 2017 with a production of Wilde's A Woman of No Importance, to be directed by Dromgoole at a Nimax theatre to be announced. This will initiate an Oscar Wilde season revolving around his four great Victorian plays, which defined the fin-de-siècle and are still popular today: Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest.

The Wilde season will run for a year and will be followed by a similar exploration of the work of George Bernard Shaw.

Dromgoole stated, “It has always been my pleasure and privilege to support and promote the voices of writers, whether new writers at the Bush, the Old Vic or the Globe, or Shakespeare, the mainspring of our theatre culture. This is a wonderful chance to present the work of those writers who defined the proscenium century, and who still speak to us piercingly and profoundly today. Oscar Wilde, as exemplified in the stunning and provocative recent exhibition at Reading Gaol by Artangel, was one of the pioneering iconoclasts of the Victorian age, and these gorgeous witty plays are still shining examples of how to satirise the world you live in, and how to nudge it forwards. I look forward to presenting them across a year-long season in the West End.”

The season is not yet on sale.