Watch out for . . .
NICK MORAN, who will lead a new production of Steve Thompson’s 2009 play Roaring Trade — about a group of feral bond traders — that Moran likens to David Mamet’s tale of amoral estate agents Glengarry Glen Ross, at the Park Theatre in North London from September 23. Moran said that when the play first ran six years ago ‘everybody hated bankers, because they put everyone through so much misery, and there was little to laugh at, or about’. With the passage of time, though, he believes audiences might now appreciate the humour in the show. Playwright Thompson spent a year observing traders in the City, and his dialogue is razor sharp. Moran plays Donny, ‘a pinstriped trading spiv’ in the throes of a divorce. He said all the characters are driven ‘by their greed rather than their need’. The play also features Michael McKell, Melissa Aston-Munslow, Timothy George, Melanie Gutteridge and William Nye.
SALLY MESSHAM (pictured right), a recent RADA graduate and Laura Rogers, who will star in the stage version of Sarah Waters’s early novel Tipping The Velvet. The play is being directed by Lyndsey Turner and Laura Wade, who worked together on the hit play Posh. Ms Messham will play Nan, the innocent young woman from Whitstable in Kent whose dewy eyes are opened wide when she sees male impersonator Kitty Butler (Rogers) on stage. Nan subsequently travels to London as Kitty’s butler. Waters’s story also explored the dark underbelly of late Victorian London — but Turner’s production will feature many song-and-dance, music hall numbers. Alistair David (whose work on the Open Air Theatre’s Seven Brides For Seven Brothers is enormous fun to watch) has been hired to create the choreography. The play, a co-production with the Royal Lyceum Theatre of Edinburgh, will run at the Lyric Theatre in London’s Hammersmith from Friday, September 18. Keeley Hawes and Rachael Stirling starred in the awardwinning BBC TV version back in 2002.