Theatre News

Trudie Styler Has Tea with Johnson on Tyneside

| London's West End |

16 February 2011

Trudie Styler will make a rare stage appearance in Out of Joint’s A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson when the production plays the Customs House in South Shields on Tyneside on 4 and 5 March.

The wife of rock star Sting, Styler’s television acting credits include Midsomer Murders, Love Soup and Friends. Having established a film production company in the mid-nineties Styler’s work also also includes executive producing films such as Guy Ritchie‘s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.

Styler will join Ian Redford and Russell Barr in the play for only two dates – the piece normally being a “cosy two-hander” with Redford playing poet and essayist Samuel Johnson whilst Barr tackles the play’s other characters, both male and female.

For the production’s South Shields dates, which bring Styler close to Sting’s native Newcastle, she will play the role of Mrs Thrale – a the society hostess who was Johnson’s final unrequited love.

Adapted from James Boswell‘s The Life of Samuel Johnson and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson is helmed by Out of Joint’s artistic director Max Stafford-Clark. In addition to its dates at the Customs House the production visits Warwick Arts Centre, Darlington, Salisbury, Bath and Leeds.

A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson continues what Stafford-Clark refers to on the company’s website as a “tradition of literary biography” which has included The Libertine about George Etherege and the Earl of Rochester; A Laughing Matter featuring the lives of Dr Johnson, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith and Joshua Reynolds and Sebastian Barry‘s Andersen’s English which played the Hampstead Theatre in April 2010 depicting the visit of Hans Christian Andersen to Charles Dickens.