Danny Dyer is to return to the London stage to play Sid Vicious in new play Kurt & Sid at Trafalgar Studio 2 from 9 September (press night 14 September).
Kurt & Sid, by Roy Smiles, imagines a meeting between two self-destructive music icons: Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who shot himself in 1994, and his hero, Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, who died of a heroin overdose in 1979.
Smiles sets his play in 1994. Cobain, on the cusp of pulling the trigger on his gun, sits in an attic extension where he is visited by a man purporting to be Sid Vicious. Whether he is a ghost, a figment of Kurt’s imagination, a hallucination, a dream or a Punk impersonator remains to be seen as the two musicians trade quips about the emptiness of fame and share a mutual understanding about drug addiction and self-destruction.
Dyer is best known for his screen work which includes the films Human Traffic, Mean Machine, The Football Factory, The Business and Adulthood, though he has been seen on the stage in productions of Pinter’s Celebration, No Man’s Land and The Homecoming.
He is joined in Kurt & Sid by Shaun Evans, who was recently seen in Sky1’s adaptation of Martina Cole’s novel The Take. His other screen credits include Teachers, Ashes To Ashes, Boy A, The Virgin Queen and the recent film Telstar.
Currently playing in the intimate Trafalgar Studio 2 is Ella Hickson’s Eight (13-25 July), which plays concurrently with two performances of Clayton Littlewood’s Dirty White Boy: Tales Of Soho (17 & 24 July).
CB