Eve Best with her Best Actress Olivier
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Best Joins Spacey Moon, Pike Does Performances

Eve Best (pictured), who won a hat trick of Best Actress awards for her title performance in last year’s Hedda Gabler, will star opposite Kevin Spacey in the Old Vic revival of Eugene O’Neill’s 1947 play A Moon for the Misbegotten (See News, 8 Sep 2006), which runs from 26 September to 23 December 2006 (previews from 15 September).

Josie (Best), a towering woman with a quick tongue and a ruined reputation lives in a dilapidated Connecticut farmhouse with her conniving father, Phil Hogan. Together they’re a formidable force as they scrape together a livelihood. But Josie’s softer side is exposed through her love of Jim Tyrone (Spacey), Hogan’s landlord and drinking buddy – a third-rate actor whose dreams of stardom were washed away by alcohol.

The production reunites Spacey with director Howard Davies, whose 1998 Almeida production of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh brought Spacey to the Old Vic stage for the first time when it transferred to the West End and won him a clutch of Best Actor awards. It’s a similar reunion for Best and Davies, who directed the actress in the 2003 National Theatre production of O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, for which Best scooped the Critics’ Circle Award for Best Actress.

Best won her second Critics’ Circle Best Actress Award this year for Hedda Gabler, which transferred to the West End last summer after its initial run at the Almeida. The Richard Eyre production also won Best the Evening Standard and Olivier trophies for Best Actress. Her other stage credits include Three Sisters, The Coast of Utopia, The Cherry Orchard, The Heiress and ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

A Moon for the Misbegotten is designed by Bob Crowley with lighting by Paule Constable, sound by Christopher Shutt and music by Dominic Muldowney, and co-produced by Elliot Martin, Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer.

Next month, Rosamund Pike will join Henry Goodman in the UK premiere production of playwright Brian Friel’s new play, Performances, at Wilton’s Music Hall in east London, where it has a strictly limited season from 3 to 15 July 2006 (See News, 30 May 2006).

The play, directed by Lou Stein (founding artistic director of London's Gate Theatre), explores celebrated 20th-century Czech composer Leos Janacek’s (Goodman) attitudes towards his art and personal life and looks at how a romantic obsession with a much younger married woman, Kamila Stosslova (Pike), produced his greatest music, including the string quartet Intimate Letters. It was first seen at the Dublin Festival in 2003.

On screen, Rosamund Pike’s credits include Pride and Prejudice, The Libertine, Love in a Cold Climate and Die Another Day. On stage, she played the title role in Terry Johnson’s 2003 play Hitchcock Blonde, which transferred to the West End after its premiere at the Royal Court. Later this year, she’s expected to return to the West End in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke.

Friel’s other plays include The Home Place and Dancing at Lughansa. Performances features music by the Brodsky Quartet, an international chamber-music quartet which has been performing and recording since 1972. Brodsky Quartet was presented with a Royal Philharmonic Society Award for an outstanding contribution to the world of music in May 1998.

- by Terri Paddock

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