Theatre News

Cast: Chancellor in Credit, Stoppard Rocks, Timon

| London's West End |

13 June 2008

Anna Chancellor (pictured) will return to the Donmar Warehouse, where she appeared in the 2001 premiere of David Mamet’s Boston Marriage ahead of a West End transfer, to star in August Strindberg’s rarely seen 1890 play Creditors (See News, 18 Apr 2008). David Greig’s new translation, which runs from 30 September to 15 November 2008 (previews from 25 September), is directed by actor Alan Rickman, who won a Whatsonstage.com Best Director Award in 2006 for My Name Is Rachel Corrie.

In the three-hander, Chancellor plays a sexually obsessed woman in a second marriage to a crippled artist who, with his best friend as advisor, seeks to determine what a husband’s proper role should be. Chancellor was just seen on stage in Howard Brenton’s Never So Good at the National and is a familiar screen face from Spooks, Pride and Prejudice and Four Weddings and a Funeral. She’s joined in Creditors by Tom Burke as the husband and Owen Teale (who was in the 2003 revival of Strindberg’s Dance of Death with Ian McKellen) as his friend.

In other play casting updates:

At Hampstead Theatre, Ed Stoppard and Tracy-Ann Oberman will play DH Lawrence and his vociferous wife Frieda in the world premiere of Amy Rosenthal’s comedy On the Rocks, which has a limited season from 1 to 26 July 2008 (previews from 26 June). In 1916, the Lawrences persuade their closes friends, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry (played by Charlotte Emmerson and Nick Caldecott) to join them in a co-habiting experiment in a Cornish village. Clare Lizzimore directs.

At Shakespeare’s Globe (See News, 6 Feb 2008), Simon Paisley Day (currently in The Ugly One at the Royal Court) will take the title role in Lucy Bailey’s new production of Timon of Athens, running from 6 August to 3 October 2008 (previews from 26 July) as part of this year’s “Totus Mondus” summer repertory season. Patrick Godfrey plays Flavius. The production is designed by William Dudley, with choreography by Punchdrunk’s Maxine Doyle and music by Django Bates.

At the Tricycle (See News, 19 May 2008), there will be several reprisals but also some newcomers for the return runs of previous hits Ron Hutchinson’s Moonlight and Magnolias (2 July to 2 August) and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s Let There Be Love (5 to 30 August). In the first, original cast members Andy Nyman and Steven Pacey will be newly joined by Nicholas Woodeson (just seen in the 50th anniversary revival of The Birthday Party) and Rebecca Calder. In the second, all three original cast members – Joseph Marcell, Sharon Duncan-Brewster and Lydia Leonard – will be back for a second helping.

– by Terri Paddock