Catherine Tate Goes Under Eldridge’s Blue Sky
Subject to final confirmation, actress-comedienne Catherine Tate (pictured) will return to the West End this summer to star in David Eldridge’s 2000 play Under the Blue Sky. The new revival will have a limited season at the Duke of York’s theatre, running from 16 July to 20 September 2008 (previews from 10 July).
In the darkly comic play, a group of teachers get together for a long evening of drinking tequila and revealing secrets about friendship and love, both shared and unrequited.
Under the Blue Sky was first seen at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs in September 2000 in a production directed by Rufus Norris with a cast including Sheila Hancock. This new West End premiere production will be directed by Anna Mackmin, who directed Orlando Bloom in a revival of another Royal Court play, David Storey’s In Celebration, at the Duke of York’s last summer. No further casting has yet been confirmed.
Best known for her self-penned BBC TV comedy sketch series The Catherine Tate Show, Tate was last seen in the West End in 2005, appearing with David Schwimmer in Neil LaBute’s Some Girls at the Gielgud. Her other stage acting credits include A Servant to Two Masters, The Way of the World and The Exonerated, while on screen she’s also been seen in Bleak House, Starter for Ten, Scenes of Sexual Nature, Wild West and Men Behaving Badly and is currently starring as Donna Noble opposite David Tennant’s Doctor in Doctor Who, a part she first played in a Christmas 2006 special.
Author David Eldridge’s other plays include Market Boy, Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness, M.A.D., Serving It Up, Summer Begins, A Week with Tony, the multi award-winning stage adaptation of Festen, and new versions of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and John Gabriel Borkman.
Currently at the Duke of York’s, the Whatsonstage.com and Olivier Award-nominated South African version of The Magic Flute (Impempe Yomlingo), transferred from the Young Vic, will finish its eight-week West End season on 19 April (See News, 19 Dec 2007). It’s followed by the Royal Court transfer of 21-year-old Polly Stenham’s multi award-winning debut play That Face (See News, 18 Feb 2008), which stars Lindsay Duncan, Matt Smith and Skins Hannah Murray and runs for ten weeks from 8 May to 5 July 2008 (previews from 1 May).
– by Terri Paddock
