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Evans, Higgins & Sosanya Join RSC Festival SeasonDate: 6 March 2003
More casting has been announced for the Royal Shakespeare Company's Stratford Festival Season, which begins tonight (6 March 2003) with previews of The Tamer Tamed, and continues with seven further productions performed in repertory by a core ensemble of 60 actors over eight months up to 8 November 2003.
In addition to the already announced, high-profile returns of Ralph Fiennes, Alexandra Gilbreath, Jasper Britton, Emma Fielding and Henry Goodman - the last, fresh from his redemptive Broadway triumph in Tartuffe (See News, 4 Dec 2002) - the season will feature Daniel Evans and Nina Sosanya as well as RSC debuts for Paul Higgins, Martin Hutson and Eve Myles.
Evans - who won an Olivier for Michael Grandage's Donmar revival of Merrily We Roll Along and is currently playing Ariel to Derek Jacobi's Prospero in Grandage's production of The Tempest in the West End - will star opposite Fielding in both Sean Holmes' production of Measure for Measure (as Angelo) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre next month and in Dominic Cooke's Cymbeline (as Posthumous) at the Swan from August.
Appearing with Evans and Fielding in Measure for Measure is Paul Higgins (as the Duke). Higgins' many stage credits - at the National, Royal Court and Almeida - include An Enemy of the People, Nightsongs and Conversations After a Burial. This past summer, he played Oberon in Shakespeare's Globe's award-winning production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Nina Sosanya and Martin Hutson pair up, as Rosalind and Orlando, for As You Like It, which begins previews in the RST on 13 March 2003. Sosanya (whose TV credits include The Jury and Teachers) has just finished a Donmar run in The Vortex with Francesca Annis, who Hutson recently appeared alongside in Ghosts. Hutson's other West End credits include Another Country.
In the RST in September, Eve Myles, familiar to Welsh television viewers for her role in the long-running series Belonging, will play Lavinia in Bill Alexander's production of Titus Andronicus, the company's first production of Shakespeare's most macabre play since Deborah Warner's 1987 outing starring Brian Cox. The title role has yet to be cast for the new production.
Amongst the season's other, previously reported highlights are: two-time Olivier winner Goodman's RSC return, after a 15-year absence, to take on the title role in Sean Holmes' July 2003 production of Richard III; the double bill of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and John Fletcher's lesser-known 'sequel' The Tamer Tamed, both directed by Gregory Doran and starring Gilbreath and Britton as Katharine and Petruchio; and, last but not least, Adrian Noble's final production as RSC artistic director, the much-anticipated revival of Ibsen's Brand, starring Ralph Fiennes. Following its Stratford run, from 18 April to 24 May in the Swan Theatre, the last will transfer to the West End's Theatre Royal Haymarket, where it opens on 4 June 2003.
- by Terri Paddock
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