Watch out for . . .
MATTHEW KELLY, who will play the patriarch in director Sam Yates’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under The Elms, with Aoife Duffin (right) as his young second wife and Michael Shea (far right) as the lustful son who betrays his father. Sule Rimi and Theo Ogundipe also appear in the play, which runs at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, from September 21. To help prepare, Yates visited the O’Neill boyhood home in New London, Connecticut. The visit made him realise that, ultimately, the play is about grief. ‘When he was writing this, he lost — in two years — his mother, father and brother,’ Yates said. O’Neill’s father was an ‘oppressive personality’, and that sense is reflected in Desire Under the Elms. ‘It’s about this young man who was grieving his mother’s death.’ Yates said that O’Neill’s mother was clearly an unhappy soul (as the forthcoming version of O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night will show; as I revealed recently, it will go to Wyndham’s Theatre from January 27, with Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville). In the family home, Yates saw the little cupboard where the mother would go and inject herself with morphine. But Desire Under The Elms is also about property and the lengths that some people will go to ensure that they inherit what they believe belongs rightly to them.
ROBERT HASTIE, the director of Sheffield Theatres, has cast Chetna Pandya as a surrogate who is due to give birth to a child with two fathers — Joshua Silver and James Lance. Chris Thompson’s play also stars Donna Berlin and will open first at Sheffield’s Studio theatre with a public dress rehearsal on September 14 and previews from September 15. The co-production will move to the Bush Theatre in West London from October 18.
SIENNA MILLER and Jack O’Connell, who breathe scorching new life into Tennessee Williams’s Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in a searing version from director Benedict Andrews in the Young Vic production at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. The performance I caught on Saturday night received a well-deserved standing ovation. The Young Vic is providing some low-price seats, which is good because this show has a youthful vibe.