EMMA WOULD LOVE OLIVIA TO BE HER NANNY
Olivia Colman played snaggletoothed Nanny McPhee in a test run of Emma Thompson’s new stage musical about the sternlooking but soft-hearted nursery nurse.
Thompson, who played the role on the big screen, told me Colman, who’s been picking up awards and major nominations for her deliciously unconventional portrait of Queen anne in The Favourite, was ‘wonderful’ in the title role when the first act of her show was workshopped.
Thompson adapted Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda stories and wrote the lyrics to go with music composed by Scots songwriter Gary Clark.
The black-clad nanny arrives, uninvited, at the home of the Brown family, ready to rid recalcitrant children (and their parents) of their worst habits.
Rory Kinnear was cast as Mr Brown, and lily James played Evangeline, the kitchen maid, for the session. ‘it was very helpful to see how to work the book,’ Thompson said of the exercise.
Next May, she and Clark — along with producer Eric Fellner from Working Title — will hold a music workshop ‘to see how the spine of the music is and take it from there’.
She laughed and said it’s ‘ as long, or an even longer process than a film . . . it takes forever’. Thompson said she would direct the production, perhaps in 2020 or 2021, because ‘if someone else does it, i’ll interfere and i’ll be annoying’. She cautioned that we shouldn’t ‘think ahead’ to Colman playing Nanny McPhee in the West End. ‘Who knows what she’ll be doing when we get round to the bloody thing?!’
But she conceded ‘it would be heaven if she were available’.
Thompson’s currently co-producing the socially alert romance last Christmas that director Paul Feig is shooting in london, starring Game of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke and Henry Golding from Crazy Rich asians, for Universal Pictures.