In what promises to be an exciting event within the Pinter at the Pinter season, Lee Evans will appear in an eclectic mixed bill alongside stage and screen favourite Meera Syal. They join the previously announced Keith Allen and Tamsin Greig from 25 October to 8 December 2018 for 23 performances only.
Evans will perform the poignantly witty Monologue and a selection of Pinter’s most hilarious comedy sketches. Evans and Syal will perform, amongst other pieces, the sketch Apart From That, whilst Syal also joins Allen and Greig in A Kind of Alaska. The play, performed alongside Landscape, movingly captures the oneiric nature of memory.
A multi-award-winning actor and comedian, Evans last performed Pinter’s work in 2007 when he starred in The Dumb Waiter at Trafalgar Studios.
Lee Evans said:
“Working with Harold Pinter was one of the most incredibly exciting experiences of my life. Of course, I found Harold to be, along with his incredible wife Antonia, two of the most generous, kind and considerate people one could ever wish to meet; a couple so desperately keen to pass on anything they could to encourage and help young actors and directors, no matter who, what or where you might be from. It didn’t matter to Harold – the most important thing to him was the work. Most of all, Harold loved it when his work allowed you, the performer, to shine. Thanks, Harold – my hero.”
Landscape is a minimalist marvel: a woman is locked in a beautiful memory and her husband demands to be heard. In A Kind of Alaska, Deborah awakes from a 29-year sleep and is suspended between the conscious and unconscious worlds. In Monologue, a loner addresses an absent friend who disappeared many years ago.
Clarence Derwent Award-winner Jonjo O’Neill (The Prudes, Unreachable) joins Paapa Essiedu, Kate O’Flynn, Antony Sher and Maggie Steed in the opening of the season, which features plays including One For The Road and Ashes to Ashes. O’Neill will appear in Mountain Language and The New World Order, as well as the first major revival of the sketch Press Conference, originally performed by Harold Pinter himself, and the world premiere of The Pres and an Officer. The evening plays for 23 performances only from 6 September.
Marking the 10th anniversary of the revered playwright’s death, Pinter at the Pinter features all Pinter’s short plays, alongside a selection of his poems and sketches.
Pinter at the Pinter is an unparalleled event featuring the short plays written by the greatest British playwright of the 20th Century, in the theatre that bears his name. They have never been performed together in a season of this kind. Each play runs for a limited number of performances.
The season will be presented in repertoire by a world-class cast, many of whom were Pinter’s friends and frequent collaborators. The cast includes Keith Allen, Jessica Barden, Ron Cook, Phil Davies, Danny Dyer, Paapa Essiedu, Lee Evans, Martin Freeman, Rupert Graves, Tamsin Greig, Jane Horrocks, Celia Imrie, John Macmillan, Emma Naomi, Tracy Ann Oberman, Kate O’Flynn, Jonjo O’Neill, Abraham Popoola, Sir Antony Sher, John Simm, Hayley Squires, Maggie Steed, David Suchet, Meera Syal, Luke Thallon, Russell Tovey, Penelope Wilton and Nicholas Woodeson.
Mark Rylance will make two special charity performances of Art, Truth and Politics, Pinter’s Nobel Prize Lecture, in aid of the Stop the War Coalition.
Direction is by Jamie Lloyd, Patrick Marber, Lyndsey Turner, Ed Stambollouian and Lia Williams, with season design by Soutra Gilmour, lighting by Jon Clark, Elliot Griggs and Richard Howell, and sound and music by George Dennis and Ben and Max Ringham.
