Watch out for . . .
SINEAD CUSACK, who returns to London’s Donmar Warehouse for the first time in 13 years to star in Abi Morgan’s drama Splendour.
Zawe Ashton and Game Of Thrones’ Michelle Fairley are also in the play, about four women who wait for a dictator in an unnamed eastern European country.
Robert Hastie, who enjoyed great success with the Donmar’s production of My Night With Reg, will direct.
Splendour was toured around the country by Paines Plough theatre company in 2000, but this marks its first major London production.
JONATHAN BAILEY, who was the clueless reporter in ITV series Broadchurch — and who has just been cast as another journalist in a new film. He will appear opposite Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz in a movie about real events, which James Marsh has just started directing.
It’s the story of Donald Crowhurst, who entered a round-the-world yacht race in 1968 even though he was a weekend sailor who knew next to nothing about big-time races.
Crowhurst conned the world into believing that he had won the competition. It later emerged this was not the only whopper he told.
Bailey is certainly an up-andcoming name. He has appeared in the BBC comedy W1A and I’ve seen him on stage many times, including in Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre production of Othello. BRADLEY COOPER, who gives a performance that’s a study in grace as the title character in The Elephant Man, which is running at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.
I saw Scott Ellis’s production in New York, but I believe Cooper and his fellow cast mates (including Patricia Clarkson and Alessandro Nivola) have grown into their roles since then.
Cooper has studied the Bernard Pomerance drama for years. When he was an impoverished acting student, he visited the Whitechapel Hospital where John Merrick, the so-called Back on stage: Sinead Cusack Elephant Man, lived. That probably helps explain why his is such an astutely natural performance. The play has taken £3.7 million at the box office for its limited run, but there are still tickets to be found.