Theatre News

Cast: Carteret & Stubbs in Donmar Salt, Full TRH Lion

Anna Carteret, Anna Calder-Marshall and Imogen Stubbs will lead the cast of Salt, Root and Roe, which opens the second Donmar residency at Trafalgar Studios 2 with a 12-week run from 14 November 2011 (previews from 10 November).

A new work by playwright Tim Price (For Once, Teamwork Under the Sofa), Salt, Root and Roe will be directed by Hamish Pirie, who was resident director at the Donmar in 2006.

The play is billed as a “heartbreaking, humorous tale of love and family set against the mythical backdrop of North Pembrokeshire”.

Twins Iola and Anest remain devoted to each other. Ageing fast, and with the time they have together more fragile by the day, they arrive at a desperate decision. Word of this reaches Anest’s daughter Menna, who rushes to her long abandoned childhood home where her own ideas of love and compromise are tested to the limit.

Anna Calder-Marshall, who previously appeared at the Donmar in A Lie of the Mind plays Iola, while Anna Carteret also returns to the Donmar, following her appearance in TS Eliot’s The Family Reunion, to play Anest.

Imogen Stubbs, whose recent credits include Little Eyolf (Jermyn Street), Private Lives (Royal Exchange) and Alphabetical Order (Hampstead) plays Menna. Gareth will be played by Roger Evans.

Subsequent plays in the season are Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol, directed by Abbey
Wright
(8-31 December) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos,
translated by Stuart Gilbert and directed by Paul Hart (5-28 January).


Full casting has been announced for Trevor Nunn’s forthcoming production of James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter, which opens at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 15 November (previews from 5 November) starring Robert Lindsay as Henry II) and Joanna Lumley as Eleanor of Aquitane.

The Lion in Winter was famously made into a 1968 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. It was revived on Broadway in 1999 in a production starring Hollywood’s Laurence Fishburne as Henry and Stockard Channing as Eleanor. It has never previously been mounted in the West End.

Lindsay and Lumley will be joined by: Tom Bateman (Much Ado About Nothing, Wyndham’s) as Richard; Sonya Cassidy (The Prince of Homburg, Donmar) as Alais; Joseph Drake ( The Deep Blue Sea and Nijinsky, CFT) as John), Rory Fleck-Byrne (Antony and Cleopatra, Liverpool Playhouse) as Philip; and James Norton (Journey’s End, Duke of York’s) as Geoffrey.

The Lion in Winter, which continues Nunn’s season as artistic director of the Theatre Royal Haymarket, runs until 28 January 2012.