Cush Jumbo, the British star of the hit US TV series The Good Fight, is to play Hamlet at the Young Vic in London. The actor, who portrayed Mark Antony in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Julius Caesar at the Donmar and was Katherina in Lloyd’s New York production of The Taming of the Shrew, will be directed by Greg Hersov.

“Greg is incredible and we go back a long way,” said Jumbo, whose previous collaborations with the director include As You Like It and Pygmalion, both at Manchester’s Royal Exchange. “You have to be ready in so many ways,” she said of taking on Hamlet. “You don’t get to choose the play, it chooses you. Shakespeare wrote no other male character like Hamlet. He wrote ‘a new man’ and I think today we are still questioning what it is to be that man, to be any man in fact.” The production, designed by Anna Fleischle, opens on 6 July next year and runs until 22 August.

In 2016, Jumbo told the Guardian that Hamlet “is absolutely on my radar. I have no fear these days. Nothing scares me any more.” She joins a long line of female actors who have played Shakespeare’s existential prince, including Michelle Terry, Maxine Peake and Ruth Negga.

‘You don’t get to choose the play, it chooses you’ … Cush Jumbo. Photograph: Young Vic/Dean Chalkley

Negga, an Oscar nominee for her role in the true-life drama Loving, will follow Jumbo in the Young Vic’s subsequent production, Portia Coughlan. Written by Marina Carr and directed by Caroline Byrne, it opens in September 2020. Negga plays the eponymous heroine, haunted by the death of her twin brother.

The Young Vic’s artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah also announced the world premiere of Orfeus: A House Music Opera, created by and starring Nmon Ford as Orfeus and directed by Charles Randolph-Wright. An Australian production, The Second Woman, created by Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, will be presented as part of London international festival of theatre. Inspired by John Cassavetes’ film Opening Night, it is a 24-hour show that presents a couple’s breakup 100 times in a row. Also coming to the Young Vic is Stef Smith’s reworking of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, previously seen at Glasgow’s Tramway. Smith presents the audience with three versions of the heroine Nora: one in 1918, one in 1968 and another in 2018.

The Young Vic’s plans also include a new programme of music and club nights in its studio, the Maria. Kwei-Armah said: “We are extremely lucky to have some beautifully versatile spaces at the Young Vic, and it has been an ambition of mine to explore new ways in which to use these spaces in order to play with art and form, and to challenge expectations of how people can engage with our theatre.”