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Annis & Le Prevost Spill Blood at Royal Court, 25 Sep

Francesca Annis and Nicholas Le Prevost will star in the London premiere of Swedish playwright Lars Noren's Blood, which opens at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs on 25 September and continues to 25 October 2003 (previews from 18 September).

In Blood, Rosa and Eric Sabato are exiles. They were imprisoned, tortured and finally expelled from Chile by the Pinochet regime in 1974. She's a war correspondent and he's an analyst. Twenty years later in Paris, Rosa's novel, Present Shadow, has just been published. It's the first time she's drawn from the experience of the coup, when their son was taken away from them. Twenty years later, they still can't find him.

Annis (pictured) was seen earlier this year in Noel Coward's The Vortex at the Donmar Warehouse. Her other stage credits include Ghosts and Hamlet, in which she played opposite her now-partner Ralph Fiennes at the Hackney Empire and later on Broadway. She's also well known for her television appearances in Wives and Daughters and Reckless, for which she was nominated for a BAFTA for three years running.

Le Prevost's many stage credits - in the West End, at the National, Royal Court and elsewhere - include An Absolute Turkey, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Amadeus, Tartuffe, Hedda Gabler, Mind Millie for Me, Privates on Parade and The Recruiting Officer. Last year, he appeared in the West End, starring as Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady and opposite Harriet Walter in the RSC's Much Ado About Nothing.

Lars Norén is one of Sweden's leading playwrights and also artistic director of Riks Drama at Riksteatern, Stockholm. Blood premiered at Denmark's Betty Nansen Teatret, Copenhagen in 1995. It's translated into English by Maja Zade and directed at the Royal Court by James Macdonald, with design by Hildegard Bechtler and sound by Ian Dickinson.

Ahead of Blood, the Broadway transfer of Suzan-Lori Parks' Topdog/Underdog, a modern Cain and Abel story, will have a limited season from 6 to 30 August 2003 at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs (See News, 1 Apr 2003). The production from New York's Public Theater stars Jeffrey White and rapper Mos Def and is directed by George C Wolfe.

Meanwhile, in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, the planned production of Dona Daley's Blest Be the Tie has been replaced Lucy Prebble's first play, The Sugar Syndrome, about a 17-year-old who finds a man twice her age via the Internet. Directed by Marianne Elliott, it runs from 16 October to 15 November 2003.

The rest of the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs autumn season continues as previously announced (See News, 8 Jul 2003), with the Presnyakov Brothers' black farce Playing the Victim, a collaboration with Told By An Idiot, running from 1 September to 4 October 2003; and, at the end of the year, Out of Joint's production of Stella Feehily's Duck arriving at the conclusion of a four-month tour and running from 25 November 2003 to 10 January 2004.

- by Terri Paddock

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