Redgrave & Jones Drive Miss Daisy to West End

As previously tipped, Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones will reprise their Broadway roles in Driving Miss Daisy in the West End this autumn, bringing Alfred Uhry‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning play to Wyndham’s Theatre from 26 September to 17 December 2011.

According to reports in the Daily Mail, the production will play a limited season in London following the success of its Broadway run which finished earlier this year.

Off-Broadway, the show played 1,195 performances at the John Houseman Theatre from 1987 to 1990 and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 1989 starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman.

The play’s Broadway revival starring Redgrave and Jones opened at the Golden Theatre on 25 October 2010, running through to 9 April 2011.

Driving Miss Daisy sees a widowed Jewish woman deemed too old to drive by her son, who hires an African American man to serve as her chauffeur. Set against the backdrop of the mid-century civil rights struggle, what begins as a troubled and hostile pairing blossoms into a life-altering friendship.

Vanessa Redgrave‘s last London stage outing was The Year of Magical Thinking, the National Theatre’s staging of Joan Didion‘s memoir, directed by David Hare. The one-woman play transferred to the NT Lyttelton in 2008 following a 2007 Broadway run.

James Earl Jones was last seen in the West End last year as Big Daddy in an all-African-American production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Whatsonstage.com Award-winning production opened in December 2009 at the Novello Theatre following a New York run at the Broadhurst Theatre.

Further London casting for the production is still to be announced.