Primadoona Transfers for Late Nights at Menier

London theatregoers will have a chance to see Edinburgh Fringe hit Primadoona, the one-woman show of Smack the Pony star Doon MacKichan, when it transfers to the Menier Chocolate Factory for a ten-date run later this month (21 to 31 October 2010).

Comedienne MacKichan, who wrote and starred in Channel 4’s sketch comedy show Smack the Pony, won a Fringe First for her performance, which ran at the Gilded Balloon from 4 August to 30 August 2010. A powerful piece, in which MacKichan tells the story of enduring bereavement, divorce and her 11-year-old son’s battle with leukaemia within a three year period, it is billed as showing “the strength of a woman who is not scared to allow people to laugh at her nightmares”.

Primadoona will play concurrently with the Menier’s production of Caryl Churchill’s A Number which opened at the South London venue earlier this week (4 October 2010). A 50-minute two-hander about human cloning, the play, which was originally staged at the Royal Court  in 2002 starring Daniel Craig and Michael Gambon, sees father and son Samuel and Timothy West reprise their 2006 Sheffield performances.

With the Wests having waited for the right space to become available to transfer the production from its original home at the Sheffield Crucible, the Menier has been configured in-the-round for the first time to match the iconic South Yorkshire venue. This layout is notably different from the Dining Room Theatre Primadoona played in Edinburgh, but could add an interesting dimension to the frantically paced one-woman comedy.

Primadoona will run Thursdays through Saturday evenings at 9.30pm with 6pm Sunday matinees from 21 to 31 October 2010.