Miller's Mr Peters' Receives UK Premiere

The Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London, will present the British premiere of Arthur Miller's new play, Mr Peters' Connections this summer. The comedy will star two-time Tony Award-winning actor John Cullum in his British theatre debut. It opens on 20 July and continues to 2 September 2000.

Set in an abandoned New York nightclub, Mr Peters' Connections centres around an ex-airline pilot who is waiting for his wife. Mr Peters has grown older than anyone he ever knew and is now trying to figure out what's happened to his life.

The play first opened off-Broadway in 1998, starring Peter Falk of TV's Colombo fame. Cullum is also well known to American theatre and television audiences. On the small screen, he played the bartender in Northern Exposure and is a regular on ER. On stage, he has won Tony Awards for both Shenandoah and On the Twentieth Century. In 1997, he starred in the 50th anniversary revival of Miller's All My Sons at the Roundabout Theatre off-Broadway.

The British presentation of Mr Peters' Connections is directed by Michael Blakemore whose credits include the award-winning production of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, still playing at the West End Duchess Theatre, as well as City of Angels and the New York production of Cy Coleman's The Life. Mr Peters' Connections is designed by Peter J Davison, with lighting by Mark Henderson and sound by John A Leonard.

Arthur Miller is one of America's foremost living playwrights. His plays include The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, After the Fall, Broken Glass and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman. A new British production of Miller's All My Sons, starring Julie Walters in her first stage role in a decade, opens at the National's Cottesloe Theatre next month.

The playwright has long been revered in the UK, where his work receives frequent airings, but he has periodically fallen out of favour in his native country. Though Miller won a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 1999, the recent Broadway production of his play The Ride Down Mt Morgan has attracted controversy. Last month, after the show's nightly performances, the British lead Patrick Stewart (of TV's Star Trek) took to using the curtain call to denounce producers for not adequately promoting the play.

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