Theatre News

Jonathan Pryce Returns to Liverpool in Caretaker

Editorial Staff
London's West End

Jonathan Pryce – who starts performances this week in Athol Fugard’s rarely seen 1975 play Dimetos at London’s Donmar Warehouse – will return to the Liverpool Everyman later this year to star in Harold Pinter’s modern classic The Caretaker, the first major UK revival of the play since Pinter’s death this past Christmas (See News, 25 Dec 2008).

Pryce spent much of his early career at the Everyman, where he eventually became artistic director and met his wife, the actress Kate Fahy. But, aside from a 40th anniversary gala event in 2004, he has not performed on the Everyman stage since the 1970s. He’ll appear in The Caretaker, directed by Christopher Morahan, from 2 to 31 October 2009.

Premiered in 1960, The Caretaker is set in the late 1950s in a seedy west London flat where two grown brothers – brain-damaged Aston and menacing Mick – have their lives disrupted by a bad-tempered tramp named Davies. Pryce will play Davies. No further casting has yet been announced.

Pryce’s many previous theatre credits include Glengarry Glen Ross, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? My Fair Lady and Oliver!. His film and TV credits include Baker Street, Victoria and Albert, Leatherheads, The Pirates of the Caribbean, Ronin, Tomorrow Never Dies and Carrington. His current production, Dimetos, opens on 25 March 2009 (previews from 19 March) at the Donmar, where it continues until 9 May (See News, 19 Sep 2008).

Other highlights in the newly announced part two of the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse’s 2009 season include: the world premiere of a new play, Lost Monsters, by local writer Laurence Wilson; a co-production with English Touring Theatre of Moliere’s 17th-century comedy The Hypochondriac, directed by Liverpool artistic director Gemma Bodinetz, which launches an autumn tour after its Playhouse dates (19 June to 11 July); and a co-production with Leeds’ West Yorkshire Playhouse of JB Priestley’s 1938 comedy When We Are Married.

In Priestley’s satire centring on three couples who gather to celebrate 25 years of so-called respectable marriage, Les Dennis appears with his real-life niece Jodie McNee in a 13-strong cast that also features Tom Georgeson, Eileen O’Brien and Polly Hemingway. WYP artistic director Ian Brown directs. The production opens in Leeds from 4 to 25 April 2009, before moving to the Liverpool Playhouse from 30 April to 23 May.

– by Terri Paddock