Actress Imogen Stubbs is to return to the London stage in the Hampstead theatre revival of Michael Frayn’s Alphabetical Order.
She is joined in the hugely experienced cast by Annette Badland, Michael Garner, Gawn Grainger, Jonathan Guy Lewis, Chloe Newsome and Ian Talbot.
Stubbs, whose films include Jack And Sarah, Sense And Sensibility and Twelfth Night, plays Lucy, a librarian, in the comedy set in a 1970s provincial newspaper office. Lucy’s muddled cuttings library is as confused as the lives of those who work for the paper, but Lucy’s new assistant Lesley is young, eager and ready to restore order.
Stubbs’s last London outing came in the Trevor Nunn-directed production of Hamlet at the Old Vic, in which she played Gertrude. Her other credits include The Relapse, Betrayal (both National Theatre), A Streetcar Named Desire (Theatre Royal Haymarket), Othello and Richard II (both Royal Shakespeare Company).
Talbot is the former Artistic Director of the Open Air Theatre who, until recently, has been playing Wilbur opposite Michael Ball in the hit musical Hairspray. Grainger has worked extensively with the National Theatre, where his credits include The Seagull, The Misanthrope, The Passion and Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads.
Both Badland and Garner are faces easily recognisable from television work, whose careers have seen them work the length and breadth of the UK. Newsome is best known as Coronation Street’s Vicky McDonald, and Lewis, who has also appeared on Corrie, was recently seen in I Found My Horn at the Orange Tree theatre and in the West End in A Few Good Men.
Alphabetical Order is staged at the Hampstead theatre as part of the venue’s 50th anniversary celebrations. It was first seen at the theatre in 1975, when it premiered there becoming an instant success. It is revived under the directorial guidance of Christopher Luscombe, who recently directed The Merry Wives Of Windsor at Shakespeare’s Globe and Enjoy at the Gielgud theatre.
MA