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Pulitzer-winning Dinner Opens at Hampstead

Donald Margulies' (pictured) Pulitzer Prize-winning off-Broadway hit, Dinner with Friends, receives its London premiere this June at the Hampstead Theatre. The production will feature British stage star Samantha Bond and American film actress Elizabeth McGovern. It opens at the north London fringe venue on 28 June 2001, following previews from 21 June.

Beth has come for dinner with friends Karen and Gabe in their Connecticut kitchen, but she’s come alone. As the lemon almond polenta dessert is served, she reveals the real reason for her partner Tom’s absence. In this comedy of marital imperfection, two couples find one infidelity too much for four to bear.

Bond is best known to theatre audiences for playing the title role, opposite Dame Judi Dench, in David Hare’s Amy's View at the National, in the West End and on Broadway. Her other recent theatre credits include The Memory of Water in the West End.

McGovern, an American now living in Britain, has appeared in numerous films including The House of Mirth, Wings of a Dove, The Handmaid’s Tale, Racing with the Moon, Once upon a Time in America and Ragtime. She has recently appeared on stage in the UK in Three Days of Rain (Donmar Warehouse) and The Misanthrope (RSC).

The women are joined in the cast by Kevin Anderson (Orphans and Sunset Boulevard) and Rolf Saxon (The Seven Year Itch). Dinner with Friends is directed by Simon Curtis and designed by Christopher Oram.

The New York production continues to run at the Variety Arts Theatre off-Broadway where it opened in November 1999. It won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A film version – starring Dennis Quaid, Andie MacDowell, Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette – is due to be televised in the US this August.

Margulies’ other plays include God of Vengeance, The Model Apartment, Sight Unseen, The Loman Family Picnic and Collected Stories, which starred Helen Mirren at the West End’s Theatre Royal Haymarket in 1999.

- by Terri Paddock

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