Kim Cattrall and Matthew Macfadyen are to star in a new Richard Eyre-directed production of Noël Coward’s Private Lives at London’s Vaudeville theatre next spring.
The comedy of manners, which will run for two weeks at the Theatre Royal Bath before transferring to the West End, will play at the Vaudeville theatre from 24 February to 1 May (press night 3 March).
Coward’s comedy finds Cattrall and Macfadyen playing former spouses who have been divorced from each other for five years. When fate finds them both honeymooning in the South of France in adjoining hotel rooms, their insatiable emotions are rekindled and they dive headlong into love and lust without a care for scandal, new partners or memories of why their marriage failed in the first place.
Cattrall, who famously plays Samantha in hit US TV and film franchise Sex And The City, last appeared on the London stage in 2006 when she starred in The Cryptogram at the Donmar Warehouse. She had made her West End debut a year earlier in the Peter Hall-directed Whose Life Is It Anyway? A native of Liverpool who has spent most of her professional acting career on the other side of the Atlantic, Cattrall’s other screen credits include Porky’s, Mannequin, Big Trouble In Little China and the upcoming Roman Polanski thriller The Ghost.
Macfadyen’s last London outing came in 2007’s The Pain And The Itch at the Royal Court, having previously played Prince Hal in the National Theatre’s production of Henry IV. A regular screen face, Macfadyen played Mr Darcy in the 2005 film adaptation of Pride And Prejudice, opposite Keira Knightley, who is soon to be seen on the London stage in The Misanthrope. Macfadyen’s other credits include hit spy drama Spooks, Dickens adaptation Little Dorrit and the upcoming Ridley Scott-directed film Robin Hood, in which he plays the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Eyre, who directs Private Lives, is the former Director of the National Theatre whose career has seen him win three Laurence Olivier Awards for productions of Guys And Dolls (1982), King Lear (1998) and Hedda Gabler (2006).
Private Lives arrives at the Vaudeville theatre following the current run of The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice, which opened earlier this week and stars X-Factor finalist Diana Vickers as a painfully shy young girl with a remarkable talent for singing like the stars.
MA