Library New Season opens with Bean’s Heretic at Lowry, 27 Sept

Richard Bean’s comedy about climate change – The Heretic opens the Library Theatre Company’s Autumn 2012/Winter 2013 season at The Lowry in Salford.

The play shared the prestigious Evening Standard Award for Best New Play in 2011 with Richard Bean’s equally successful but very different One Man, Two Guvnors.

The plot follows Dr Diane Cassell’s research into rising sea levels in the Maldives appears to contradict current predictions. An unapproved appearance on a national current affairs programme forces her boss at university, Professor Kevin Maloney, who happens to have once been her lover, to suspend her.

Playing Dr Cassell is Cate Hamer, who has appeared in most of the country’s leading regional theatres. Cate was last seen at the Library Theatre Company in Chris Honer’s acclaimed adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia in autumn 2010, while Stuart Fox, previously on the Library Theatre stage in the company’s production of Neil Simon’s I Ought To Be In Pictures in February 2010, takes the role of Professor Maloney. Stuart is well known to Greater Manchester theatre audiences having appeared in well-received productions at Bolton Octagon Theatre of Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange in 2006, and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in 2008.

Making her Library Theatre debut as Diane’s vulnerable and anorexic daughter Phoebe is Sophie Robinson, who recently appeared in Juno and the Paycock in what was the first-ever joint production between the Royal National Theatre in London and Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Liverpool actor Ciaran Kellgren, who hit the headlines in 2009 when he took the lead role in a high-profile production of Peter Pan which opened at the Kensington Gardens Theatre and subsequently transferred to the O2 Arena, plays first-year undergraduate Ben Shotter, who finds himself falling for Phoebe.

Andrew Westfield, seen recently on TV in hits such as Cranford and Downton Abbey, as plain-speaking ex-Royal Marine Geoff Tordoff, the university’s security chief; and Polly Lister, as straight-laced Human Resources Officer Catherine Tickell.

The Heretic runs at the Lowry from 27 September – 13 October.