Hattie gets all amorous in Orpheus
Award-winning Hattie Morahan will join Jemima rooper, with Seth numrich as the drifter who brings sexual danger to a Southern backwater in Tennessee williams’s drama Orpheus descending.
director Tamara Harvey has cast the trio in her production of the play she describes as about ‘passion, lost hope and rekindled desire’.
Morahan, who won trophies for her performance as nora in A doll’s House at the Young Vic, has been cast as Lady Torrance, the proprietress of a store in fictional Two river County.
She’s the lonely daughter of an immigrant Sicilian murdered years before by the Ku Klux Klan; she’s also unhappily married to a loathsome tyrant.
Everything changes when Val Xavier, a handsome guitar-playing stranger in a snakeskin jacket, descends to rescue Lady Torrance.
‘Lady’s this woman who feels that her life has gone — but life offers up a second chance,’ said Harvey, who has waited 19 years for the opportunity to direct williams’s 1957 drama.
She was training at the williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts when a director there gave her a copy of the play. Harvey said Orpheus descending has stood the test of time and has contemporary relevance.
‘There’s something really powerful in it, in this moment, about how we treat outsiders and how small communities can turn on anyone who’s in the least bit different; anyone from out of town,’ said Harvey, who worked with writer Laura wade on the acclaimed play Home, i’m darling.
The latter started at Theatr Clwyd (where Harvey is the artistic chief) before transferring to the national Theatre then the duke of York’s, where it’s running until April 13. it has just received five Olivier Award nominations.
Harvey described Morahan and rooper (the latter has been cast as Carol Cutrere, who has met Val Xavier before) as ‘that rare combination ... who can be brilliantly funny but also break our hearts’.
numrich, an American actor who has enjoyed theatrical success in new York and London, takes on a role that was played by Marlon Brando in a film version renamed The Fugitive Kind.
Orpheus runs at Theatr Clwyd from April 15 and at the Menier Chocolate Factory, London, from May 9.