Haig plays Lear in Bath, Bremner & Hodge star in Coward’s Values

The Theatre Royal Bath has announced a starry summer season, including revivals of Noel Coward’s Relative Values directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Patricia Hodge, Caroline Quentin and Rory Bremner and King Lear directed by Lucy Bailey and starring David Haig.

There will also be productions of Candida by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Simon Godwin, and Feydeau’s A Little Hotel on the Side, adapted by John Mortimer and directed by Lindsay Posner and Cal McCrystal.

The season opens, from 12 June to 29 June 2013, with Relative Values, Coward’s 50s-set comedy about the culture clash between the glittering world of Hollywood and the stiff upper lip of the English aristocracy.

Starring Olivier Award-winner Patricia Hodge as Felicity, Caroline Quentin as Moxie and Rory Bremner making his theatre debut as Crestwell the butler, the play centres on the consternation caused when a young Earl announces he is to marry a Hollywood film actress. The family’s embarrassment is deepened when it transpires that the starlet’s sister is none other than Moxie, the Earl’s mother’s maid at Marshwood House.

It’s followed, from 3 to 20 July, by Royal Court associate Simon Godwin‘s revival of Bernard Shaw’s Candida, about the trouble caused to a respected Reverend when his attractive wife is propositioned by a young poet.

Next up is King Lear (25 July-10 August), which sees David Haig return to Bath following his acclaimed performance in The Madness of George III.

The production will be directed by Lucy Bailey, who has worked extensively with Shakespeare’s Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company for whom her recent productions include The Taming of the Shrew and The Winter’s Tale.

And rounding off the season is a revival of A Little Hotel on the Side by Georges Feydeau and Maurice Désvallières, which runs from 15 to 31 August.

Billed as a “side-splitting work from the supreme master of traditional farce”, the play is set in Paris at the turn of the 19th Century, where a young wife decides to teach her husband a lesson by having an affair with her neighbour in a seedy hotel. But everyone they know – including the Inspector of Public Morality – seems to have turned up on the night in question.

Using the translation by John Mortimer (Rumpole), the production is directed by Lindsay Posner (Noises Off, Abigail’s Party) and physical comedy specialist Cal McCrystal (One Man, Two Guvnors).