King’s Head’s Vieux Carré announces Charing Cross transfer

Hildegard Neil, who played Miss Carrie in the recent run at the King’s Head, will now take the central role of Mrs Wire from Nancy Crane. The show, directed by Robert Chevara, will be “redirected” for the new venue.

Neil’s credits include Cleopatra in the 1972 film of Antony and Cleopatra, and a leading role in Graham Greene’s England Made Me. She was also a prominent member of the RSC throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Chevara described the transfer as “an exciting and inspired vindication of the play and of our production”. He added: “Vieux Carré is a play I believe in passionately as a great piece of theatre and a seminal late work by Tennessee Williams. We see here a master at the top of his game, who experimented with style and content until the end of his life.”

“The play will take a totally different direction with Hildegard as Mrs Wire and I will re-interpret it for the unique and much larger new space of the Charing Cross Theatre.”

Vieux Carré, one of Williams’ lesser-performed plays, follows an aspiring young writer, and his oddball fellows-lodgers at a New Orleans boarding house. Billed as “the condensation of all Tennessee Williams’ plays”, the play is held to be deeply autobiographical. The show will run at the Charing Cross until 1 September.

Photo: Francis Loney