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My pharaoh lady! Sophie signs up as Fiennes’s Cleopatra

SOPHIE OKONEDO will play Cleopatra, the larger-thanlife Egyptian queen, opposite Ralph Fiennes as Antony in Shakespeare’s epic play about their lethal passion. The play is scheduled to run on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage later next year. No dates have been fixed yet, but both of the actors have now agreed to be in director Simon Godwin’s production. Fiennes (inset) was signed on over a year ago, and Godwin and the NT’s casting directors spent months securing Okonedo as the seductive sovereign. She was last at the NT in 1999 when she played Georgina Vesey in John Caird’s production of Money with Simon Russell Beale. Rufus Norris, the NT’s artistic director, has made a point of persuading great actresses to play on the South Bank. He has been successful with Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams in Lucy Kirkwood’s redhot new play Mosquitoes, which opened on Tuesday in the Dorfman. On August 22, Imelda Staunton returns to the National for the first preview of the much anticipated musical Follies, directed by Dominic Cooke. Godwin last directed Twelfth Night in the Olivier with Tamsin Greig, who was at once hilarious and tragic as Malvolia. The NT would like to broadcast Antony And Cleopatra via NT Live, but decisions can’t be made until the rest of the main cast for the production has been signed up. Okonedo was last on stage earlier this year, with Damian Lewis in Edward Albee’s The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?

PHIL DAVIS (right), who has featured in two series of Poldark as well as ITV’s Whitechapel, will play Scrooge in David Edgar’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Rachel Kavanaugh will direct for the RSC and the show will run at Stratford’s Royal...