Two times Laurence Olivier Award-winner Conleth Hill joins the previously announced Rory Kinnear and Ruth Wilson in the cast of Philistines at the National Lyttelton this May.
Hill’s West End stage career includes Democracy at the National in 2003, Shoot The Crow at Trafalgar Studios in 2005 and last year’s premiere of Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer at the National. He won his two Laurence Olivier Awards for Stones In His Pockets (Best Actor, 2001) and the comedy musical The Producers (Best Performance In A Supporting Role In A Musical, 2005).
Maxim Gorky’s 1902 play Philistines, in a new version by Sydney Theatre Company’s Andrew Upton, follows a restless bunch of young radicals as they hang out, have sex, dance, drink, moan and philosophise at the home of a prosperous decorator. While Pyotr (Kinnear), a sometime student of law, falls for the lovely, loose-living lodger, his sister Tanya (Wilson) carps on about the tedium of life, lusts after Nil and botches her own suicide.
Hill plays Teterev. The cast also includes Mark Bonnar as Nil, Duncan Bell, Jonathan Bryan, Marcus Cunningham, Phil Davis, Susannah Fielding, Rendah Heywood, Stephanie Jacob, Maggie McCarthy and Justine Mitchell.
Howard Davies directs. Among his other National credits are The Life Of Galileo, Paul, All My Sons (for which he won a Best Director Laurence Olivier Award in 2001) and Mourning Becomes Electra. Elsewhere in London his directorial credits include last year’s A Moon For The Misbegotten at the Old Vic, Yasmina Reza’s Conversations After A Burial, Noel Coward’s Private Lives and Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which won him his first Best Director Laurence Olivier Award in 1999.
Philistines opens in the Lyttelton on 30 May after previews from 23 May.
CB