The National Looks Back In Anger
Michael Sheen has been announced to play the role of Jimmy Porter in a new production of John Osborne’s classic drama, Look Back in Anger, originally produced at the Royal Court in 1956 and widely regarded to have changed the course of British drama at the time. Opening on July 15 (after previews from July 9) at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre, the production is directed by Gregory Hersov, artistic director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre.
The role of Jimmy Porter, the play’s articulate anti-hero who was quickly dubbed an ‘angry young man’ (a title which subsequently became attached to Osborne as well as the new generation of playwrights that emerged in his wake) was originally played by Laurence Olivier. More recently, a West End production at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, starred Kenneth Branagh.
Michael Sheen, previously seen at the National in Pinter’s The Homecoming and David Lan’s The Ends of the Earth, most recently played Mozart in Peter Hall’s revival of Peter Shaffer’s Broadway-bound Amadeus – a role he will reprise on Broadway in the fall. Other leading roles include the title roles of Henry V for the RSC and Peer Gynt, directed by Yukio Ninagawa, at the Barbican Centre.
Playing Jimmy Porter’s long-suffering wife, Alison, Emma Fielding returns to the National where she starred in the original production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. The cast also includes Jason Hughes, Matilda Ziegler and William Gaunt.
Meanwhile, the UK premiere of a play by Putlizer prize-winning poet and former American Poet Laureate Rita Dove, The Darker Face of the Earth, will be directed by James Kerr, making his National Theatre directing debut. The play, described as a powerful exploration of sexual and racial tensions on a cotton plantation in pre-Civil War South Carolina, is Dove’s first full-length verse play. The writer, who served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995, received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. It opens on August 5, following previews from July 30, at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre.
The National are also presenting Cloudstreet, a play adapted by Nick Enright and Justin Monjo from a novel by Tim Winton, at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith for a season, opening on September 14 (following previews from September 10) and running to October 3. Described as an epic story sprawling over twenty years, of two families, the Pickles and the Lambs, whose lives are thrown together in the house at No 1 Cloud Street, it is being seen in a production by Company B, one of Australia’s leading theatre companies, in their British debut.
The National have also announced that actress Fiona Shaw, who was last seen at the National playing the title role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie last summer and has previously performed there in the title roles of The Good Person of Sichuan and Richard II as well as Machinal, will direct a new production of George Bernard Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses. The production, which will tour throughout the UK and Ireland from October 1999 to January 2000, will also be seen at the National’s Cottesloe Theatre in December and January.
– Mark Shenton, Whatsonstage.com
