Page 1054 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

Theatre

See film and TV stars on the London stage

Sarah Jessica Parker will make her West End debut opposite husband Matthew Broderick in
Plaza Suite. Photograph: Joan Marcus

There are particularly promising roles for screen stars this year. Themed casting for
Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker (making her West End debut) in Neil
Simon’s 1968 romantic comedy Plaza Suite (Savoy, 17 January to 31 March): the real-
life Hollywood marrieds will playing three different couples in John Benjamin Hickey’s
Broadway production. And dream casting for Michael Sheen when he plays Aneurin
(Nye) Bevan, who led the creation of the NHS. Written by Tim Price, author of Teh
Internet Is Serious Business, and billed as “surreal and spectacular”, Nye (Olivier, 24
February to 11 May) imagines Bevan looking back on his childhood, his days as a miner
and his fights with Churchill. The “epic Welsh fantasia” is directed by Rufus Norris in
his final year as the National’s artistic director.

Bold casting for Sarah Snook. The actor, last seen on the London stage in The Master
Builder in 2016, succeeds Succession by taking on all 26 roles in Kip Williams’s
adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s pact-with-the-devil novel The Picture of Dorian
Gray (Haymarket, 6 February to 11 May). Williams, artistic director of the Sydney
Theatre Company, promises a contemporary version and a staging that aims to deliver
“an explosive interplay of live performance and video”.

Matt Smith will star in an English-language version of Thomas Ostermeier’s
reimagining of An Enemy of the People (Duke of York’s, 6 February to 6 April), Ibsen’s
powerful, complicated play about whistleblowing and the dangerous power of crowd
opinion. After his 2023 appearance as Bach in Bath, Brian Cox takes on one of the best
and biggest of theatrical parts, and one with Succession echoes. He is the patriarch of
another troubled family in Eugene O’Neill’s mighty Long Day’s Journey into