Samuel Barnett, Alex Jennings, and Antony Sher, et al. to Play Charles Dickens in Radio 4 Drama

Theater veterans Samuel Barnett, Alex Jennings, and Antony Sher, along with Hugo Docking, are all set to play Charles Dickens in Michael Eaton’s Dickens’ London, according to a report on the website for the U.K. magazine The Stage. Each performer will play the writer at a different stage in his life.

Eaton’s work is a quartet of short plays which will be recorded for broadcast on Radio 4 in the U.K. at the end of the year, which will be the beginning of the channel’s celebration of the 200th anniversary of the writer’s birth in 2012. The plays are based on journalistic essays by Dickens, and each will be accompanied by a film made by artists from the Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network.

In related news, Radio 4 has announced it will broadcast two new adaptations of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Martin Chuzzlewit.