Theatre News

Tour dates & further casting announced for Johnson’s Hysteria

Theatre Royal Bath’s production of Terry Johnson‘s 1993 play Hysteria has announced tour dates. The show, which stars Antony Sher, will run at the Theatre Royal Bath from 26 July to 18 August 2012 (press night 2 August), before touring to Richmond, Oxford and Cambridge. 

In 1939, 82-year-old Sigmund Freud, who has fled from Nazi-occupied Austria, settles down in a quiet Hampstead suburb where he aims to spend his dying days in peace. When surrealist painter Salvador Dali unexpectedly turns up in his study, along with a young woman who finds it impossible to keep her clothes on, all hell breaks loose.

Olivier Award-winner Antony Sher’s credits include the RSC’s Richard III and Stanley for the National Theatre. Other stage work includes Othello, Macbeth, Torch Song Trilogy and, recently, Broken Glass in the West End.

The production also stars David Horovitz, who appeared recently in Mike Leigh‘s Grief at the National Theatre; Will Kean, who returns to Bath following starring in the theatre’s Peter Hall Season in 2004; and Indira Varma, who played Olivia in Twelfth Night with Donmar West End at Wyndham’s Theatre in 2009.

Terry Johnson‘s work as a director and writer includes Insignificance, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Hitchcock Blonde and Entertaining Mr Sloane. He won the 2010 Tony Award for his direction of La Cage aux Folles.

The production is designed by Les Brotherston and lit by Paul Pyant.

Hysteria runs at the Theatre Royal Bath from 26 July to 18 August and the Richmond Theatre from 20 to 25 August. It will then play at the Oxford Playhouse in the week commencing 27 August and at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in the week commencing 3 September (performances at both venues to be confirmed).

– Rosie Bannister