Maggie Smith Plays Albee’s Lady???

If she can fit it in between her Harry Potter filming commitments, Dame Maggie Smith may be back in the West End in 2007. According to the Daily Mail, she’s hoping to star in a revival of The Lady from Dubuque, directed by Anthony Page. In Edward Albee’s rarely performed 1980 play, a party at which three couples have been playing 20 Questions ends when the hostess, dying of cancer, can no longer bear her pain. Afterwards, a mysterious woman, who may be the mother of the hostess, arrives and raises more difficult questions. Smith was last seen on the West End stage in the 2002 world premiere of David Hare’s The Breath of Life at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, where her co-star from that play, Dame Judi Dench, is currently starring in Noel Coward’s Hay Fever. In 1997, Smith appeared at the same address in another Albee revival, A Delicate Balance, also directed by Anthony Page, whose other Albee credits include the UK premiere of The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, and this year’s revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Kathleen Turner. Smith’s many other stage credits include, most recently, Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van and The Importance of Being Earnest.

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