Francesca Annis is to lead the cast of new Bush theatre production Where’s My Seat?, a trio of plays being used to put the West London’s theatre’s new home through its paces.
Annis is joined in the production by Debbie Chazen, Richard Cordery, Hugo Speer, Hugh Skinner and Nina Sosanya.
The show, the first in the Bush’s new home at the Old Shepherd’s Bush Library, is an evening of three short plays by Deirdre Kinahan, Jack Thorne and Tom Wells, the auditorium being laid out differently for each play. In addition to the restrictions placed on the playwrights by the venue configuration, they each had to include stage directions provided by one of Alan Ayckbourn, Michael Grandage and the Bush’s outgoing Artistic Director Josie Rourke, along with nine props chosen by the National Theatre, among them an oversized strawberry, two stuffed hares and a necklace made of human fingers.
The creative teamings have now been confirmed as Wells with Ayckbourn’s directions with a theatre in the round, Kinehan with Grandage’s directions on a thrust stage, and Thorne with Rourke’s directions and an End On stage.
Where’s My Seat, which runs from 15 June to 2 July marks Annis’s first appearance on the London stage since Rupert Goold’s production of Time And The Conways at the National Theatre in 2009. A veteran of both stage and screen, her TV work includes Cranford and Jane Eyre, while she has graced cinemas in Milk, The Debt Collector and Cleopatra.
MA