Theatre News

Plays Cast: Staunton in Balance, Morgan Gets Life

Imelda Staunton and Lucy Cohu will join ­Penelope Wilton in the Almeida Theatre’s season-closing revival of Edward Albee’s 1966 Broadway classic A Delicate Balance, which runs from 12 May to 2 July 2011 (previews from 5 May).

According to the Daily Mail BAFTA-winner Staunton, who co-starred with Mathew Horne in Entertaining Mr Sloane at Trafalgar Studios in 2009, will play Claire, an alcoholic who lives with her married sister Agnes (Wilton).

Cohu, whose recent stage credits include Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass at the Tricycle, will play Agnes’ recently divorced daughter Julia. The production is helmed by James Macdonald, who directed Judgment Day at the Almeida in 2009.

The last major London revival of A Delicate Balance starred Eileen Atkins and Maggie Smith at the West End’s Theatre Royal Haymarket. The Almeida has previously produced Albee’s The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, The Play About the Baby and his best-known work, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.


The Daily Mail also reports that Colin Morgan will return to the stage in black comedy Our Private Life, by Colombian playwright Pedro Miguel Rozo, which opens in the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs on 11 February.

Morgan made his stage debut in the title role of the Young Vic’s adaptation of Vernon God Little in 2007 and has since risen to fame in BBC series Merlin.

Directed by Lyndsey Turner (Posh), Our Private Life centres on what happens when a rumour spreads like wildfire through a Colombian village, and a respectable family start to wither in the heat. As long-buried secrets begin to surface, their efforts to discern truth from slander become fused with a desire for justice.

Writer Rozo first worked with the Royal Court in Bogotá in 2004 and developed the play during the 2009 Royal Court International Residency in London. Translated by Simon Scardifield, it runs to 12 March 2011.