1st Night Photos: Witt & Reilly Play Johnson Piano

In this unpredictable, funny and disturbing new play, Johnson turns his errant imagination towards an equally errant Tory MP and his alarmingly difficult offspring. There’s a wedding at the weekend, Hello‘s gazumped OK, the piano’s locked and the starlings are overdue…. Two sisters are struggling to come to terms with the past, present and each other.

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Johnson first cast Kelly Reilly, aged just 19, in Elton John’s Glasses, as well as his later productions of The London Cuckolds and The Graduate. Her other credits include Blasted, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Look Back in Anger and After Miss Julie on stage, and Pride and Prejudice, The Libertine and Mrs Henderson Presents on screen. Hollywood actress Alicia Witt is best known for her films Two Weeks Notice, Vanilla Sky and Mr Holland’s Opus as well as American TV’s Cybill. She made her West End debut two years ago in a revival of Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things.

For 1st Night Photos, our Whatsonstage.com photographer was on hand for the Piano/Forte post-show party at the Royal Court with Witt, Reilly and Johnson as well as other members of the company – Oliver Cotton, Danny Webb, Natalie Walter, Nuria Benet and Sebastian Gonzalez. Other guests included Samuel West, Henry Goodman, Joe Penhall, Tamara Harvey, Nica Burns, literary agent Mel Kenyon (from TV’s The Play’s the Thing). Piano/Forte is designed by Mark Thompson, with lighting by Simon Corder and sound by Ian Dickinson. Its limited season continues at the Royal Court until 14 October 2006.

– by Terri Paddock