Age-old love story starts with a kiss...
EARLY efforts are being made to bring Tony award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen to London, but it will probably go outside the West End first, then transfer. It’s a stunning piece of work, but a major factor in its success is the central performance by
ANNE- MARIE DUFF, 46, and Kenneth Cranham, 72, are to star as May-December lovers in a new play.
The acclaimed actors will lead Simon Stephens’s drama Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle on to the stage of Wyndham’s Theatre from October 3. (The run will include 30,000 seats priced at under £20.)
‘It’s an accidental-on-purpose love story between a 42-year-old woman and a 75-year-old man,’ Cranham told me, adding: ‘That doesn’t come your way very often, does it?’
The play opens with Georgie (Duff) approaching a stranger in a train station and planting a kiss on his neck. The neck happens to belong to a butcher called Alex (Cranham); and the kiss sets off a chain reaction of emotions between the disparate pair. It marks an important coupling behind the scenes, too — Heisenberg launches Elliott & Harper Productions, formed by director Marianne Elliott and producer Chris Harper.
Elliott is the director with the magic touch: the woman behind The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time (which Stephens adapted from Mark Haddon’s novel) and War Horse, which became hits not only at the National Theatre, but internationally, too.
Which is where Chris Harper comes in. He helped organise the commercial exploitation of the NT’s plays, including both of the above, plus One Man, Two Guvnors.
Elliott has worked with Duff before, on a couple of plays at the NT — Saint Joan and Husbands And Sons. She told me Heisenberg is ‘ about how unpredictable life is’.
‘They shouldn’t be together,’ she said of the seemingly mismatched pair. ‘But they find a spark, despite everything.’
Duff agreed. ‘These two people function in their own complicated way and come together in an extraordinary May-December way,’ she told me.
Their ages, she argued, are actually irrelevant.
‘Age is so relative now; especially as we don’t define ourselves completely by our age in the way previous generations did. It’s a great relief! Why should we be governed by silly rules?’
The actress said she was sometimes amazed that people are still getting together because so many of us behave ‘in an insular way’, spending all our time looking at our screens and tablets.
‘We’ve all become a bit dislocated from each other; and all these ghastly events [the terrorist attacks in Manchester and London and the Grenfell Tower fire] remind us that we need to connect to each other.’
She believes Stephens’s play goes right to the heart of those connections.
Duff is currently appearing in Common at the National and doing voice work on a new animated version of Watership Down.
After that, she has five weeks off to have fun ‘ with my small person’ (her son, Brendan).
Cranham, meanwhile, is filming four-part ITV drama Hatton Garden, about the infamous safe deposit box robbery, for director Paul Whittington.
He and Duff haven’t worked together before, but they share a mutual passion ... for Elvis Presley. ‘The King does get a mention in the play,’ Cranham revealed.
Elliott & Harper are planning a raft of shows, including a gender-swapping production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, starring Rosalie Craig and choreographed by Drew McOnie (Elliott will direct).
Elliot is also in advanced discussions to take another of her efforts — the brilliant Angels In America, starring Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane — to New York in 2018.
Tickets for Heisenberg go on sale at 10am today via 08444 4825120 or delfont mackintosh.co.uk.