Theater News

Allam, Beale, Higgins, Redgrave to Appear This Summer at London’s National Theatre

Simon Russell Beale
(© Joseph Marzullo/Retna)
Simon Russell Beale
(© Joseph Marzullo/Retna)

Roger Allam, Simon Russell Beale, Clare Higgins, and Corin Redgrave are among the stars set to appear at The National Theatre this summer.

Thomas Middleton’s bloody Elizabethan classic The Revenger’s Tragedy, directed and designed by Coram Boy helmer Melly Still, begins performances at the Olivier on May 27. The cast will feature Adjoa Andoh, Tom Andrews, Ken Bones, Donatella Cabras, Billy Carter, Elliot Cowan, Conor Doyle, Barbara Flynn, John Heffernan, Peter Hinton, Derek Howard, Rory Kinnear, Pieter Lawman, Jane Leaney, Tommy Luther, Katherine Manners, Rob McNeill, Pamela Merrick, Simon Nagra, Rick Nodine, Jamie Parker, Richard Shanks, Ross Waiton, and Lizzie Winkler.

Joining that show in repertory on July 24 will be Howard Davies’ production of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s drama Her Naked Skin. Set in London in 1913 when the Suffragette movement is at its height, the play centers on Lady Celia Cain, an upper-class woman trapped in a frustrating marriage who, while serving time in Holloway prison as part of the emancipation fight, begins an erotic relationship with a young seamstress.

At the Lyttleton will be Afterlife, Michael Frayn’s new play directed by Michael Blakemore, beginning on May 27. It investigates the life of the Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt, to be played by Roger Allam. The cast will feature David Burke, Abigail Cruttenden, Peter Forbes, Glyn Grain, Selina Griffiths, and David Schofield.

Also in the Lyttelton, in early evening performances, Corin Redgrave will read Oscar Wilde’s poetic love letter De Profundis, June 16-July 2, and Simon Russell Beale and Clare Higgins will play a long-married couple in a revival of Harold Pinter’s 1961 short three-hander A Slight Ache, July 21-August 13.

In the Cottesloe, Lee Hall’s new play The Pitmen Painters, runs May 19-June 15. The piece, which premiered at Newcastle’s Live Theatre last September, is set in 1934 in Ashington, where a group of miners have hired a professor to teach an art appreciation class. The production, directed by Max Roberts, will feature the original Newcastle cast: Christopher Connel, Michael Hodgson, Ian Kelly, Brian Lonsdale, Lisa McGrillis, Deka Walmsley, David Whitaker and Phillippa Wilson. That play will be followed on June 3 by …some trace of her, a multimedia performance piece inspired by Dostoyevsky’s 1869 Russian novel The Idiot, adapted and directed by Katie Mitchell.

For more information, visit www.whatsonstage.com