WATCH OUT FOR
DANE HUGHES, Orla Hill, Teddie Malleson-Allen and Bobby McCulloch, who play the four Walker children — respectively, John, Susan, Tatty and Roger — in director Philippa Lowthorpe’s exciting and entertaining film of Arthur Ransome’s classic novel Swallows And Amazons. The thing that startled me (and the same will happen to 21st-century kids who go see it when it’s released in cinemas on August 19) is that we see children doing risky things, like rowing a boat on a lake with no adult supervision. They learn to make fire by rubbing sticks. They go camping. They run out of food. They have to make life-anddeath decisions. It’s fantastic — I thought I was 12 again! Producers Nick Barton and Joe Oppenheimer, from BBC Films, cast some adults — Rafe Spall, Kelly Macdonald, Andrew Scott, Dan Skinner, Jessica Hynes and Harry Enfield — all of whom do as they’re told, and let the children steal (and carry) the movie. Andrea Gibb’s screenplay has thrown in a couple of Russian spies, but the film is all about kids facing danger and surviving. It’s super fun. OPHELIA LOVIBOND, who will portray Elizabeth Barry opposite Dominic Cooper’s John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in Stephen Jeffreys’s play The Libertine. Readers may remember Ms Lovibond from W1A, in which she played Izzy, unattainable love object of gormless intern Will (Hugh Skinner). Jasper Britton will also star in The Libertine, which will run at the Theatre Royal Bath from August 31 and then transfer to the Theatre Royal Haymarket from September 22 for a ten-week season. CLAIRE FOY (pictured below) and Andrew Garfield, who star in the film Breathe, which actor Andy Serkis is directing from a screenplay by William Nicholson. Producer Jonathan Cavendish put the project together. It’s a love story about a couple in Kenya, and how they struggle and fight to carry on as normal after the husband is struck down with a lifethreatening illness. Garfield, who played the title role in The Amazing Spider-Man movies, is equally at home in British and U.S. roles.