Caroline Quentin is to play Christine Hamilton in Robin Soans’s new play about real-life victims of scandal. Quentin is among a cast of seven who play over 20 characters from politicians and PRs to aristocrats and photographers in Life After Scandal, which runs at the Hampstead from 20 September-20 October.
Quentin is well-known for her prolific back-catalogue of television work including Men Behaving Badly, Jonathan Creek, Life Begins, Kiss Me Kate and Blue Murder. On the London stage she has appeared in The London Cuckolds, Roots and A Game Of Love And Chance at the National, Sugar And Spice and Low Level Panic at the Royal Court, Our Country’s Good and The Live Bed Show at the Garrick. The actress was also in the original cast of Les Misérables at the Barbican in 1985.
Quentin is joined by Michael Mears as politician Neil Hamilton, Geraldine Fitzgerald as Edwina Currie/Diana Ingram, Tim Preece as Lord Montagu, Philip Bretherton as Jonathan Aitken, Bruce Alexander as Lord Charles Brocket/Craig Murray and Simon Coates as Major Charles Ingram.
Life After Scandal weaves together the personal stories of high profile scandal victims into a piece of verbatim theatre which illustrates the after-effects of such devastating exposure and reveals the extent in which we feed and are fed by scandal to avoid questions about the way we live. Soans, who is also an actor, has written several other plays with similarly hot topics, including Talking To Terrorists and The Arab-Israeli Cookbook.
Life After Scandal is directed by Hampstead Artistic Director Anthony Clark.
CB