Watch out for . . .

TOBY STEPHENS and Claire Skinner, who will star in a new production of Peter Nichols’s 1967 black comedy A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, a disturbingly funny play about a couple, Bri and Sheila, and their domestic routines at home with daughter Josephine, who is brain-damaged and in a wheelchair. Simon Evans will direct the play at Trafalgar Studios where it will run from September 21. Stephens (above) says he’s glad to be working with Skinner again ‘after quite a long interval — some 17 years, I think!’ It was 18, actually; and they appeared in Stephen Poliakoff’s TV drama Perfect Strangers.

Stephens also stars in Poliakoff’s latest BBC TV drama series Summer Of Rockets. He said he couldn’t believe A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg was first staged in 1967. ‘The play still feels very raw and relevant,’ he told me, adding that when he read it for the first time he found it ‘vivid, dark and anarchically funny’. PaTERSOn JOSEPh , (right),who will play Ebenezer Scrooge in Jack Thorne’s adaptation of Charles dickens’s a Christmas Carol. Scrooge has become an annual Christmas event at the Old Vic, where it will run from november 23. director Matthew Warchus and casting director Jessica Ronane are busy putting together the rest of the ensemble.

Warchus’s regular creative team — Rob howell overseeing sets and costumes; composer Christopher nightingale and hugh Vanstone and Simon Baker on lighting and sound — have been assembled for more humbug . . . sorry, festive cheer! SARAH GORDY (above), who starred in Ben Weatherill’s superb play Jellyfish, also featuring Penny Layden, Daniel Young and Nicky Priest, at the National Theatre. The show, which ended its short run this week, is about a young woman with Down’s syndrome falling in love with a chap she met in Skegness. As Weatherill wrote in his programme notes: ‘We don’t see love stories with people who are different at the heart of them. And we should.’ Jellyfish deserves more life.