Hamlet - Wilton and McNally join Law
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
JOINING Jude Law in Hamlet, the final production in the Donmar’s year-long West End season at the Wyndham’s Theatre, will be Penelope Wilton (as Gertrude) and Kevin R McNally (Claudius). The production, directed by Michael Grandage, runs from June 3 (previews from May 29) to August 22, 2009.
Wilton’s previous Donmar credits include John Gabriel Borkman, The Little Foxes, A Kind of Alaska and, most recently, Enid Bagnold’s dark comedy The Chalk Garden, for which she (and her co-star Margaret Tyzack) received the Evening Standard Award for Best Actress.
Her other theatre credits include Women Beware Women (RSC) and The House of Bernada Alba (National Theatre). On screen, she has appeared in Doctor Who, Bob and Rose, Victoria and Albert and Wives and Daughters (TV); The History Boys, Match Point, Pride and Prejudice, Calendar Girls and Iris (film).
McNally’s extensive theatre credits include World Music (Donmar Warehouse), The Lady in the Van (Queens Theatre), Naked (Almeida Theatre Company), Dead Funny and Plunder (Savoy Theatre), Exact Change (Lyric Hammersmith) and Boeing-Boeing (Comedy Theatre).
His equally numerous screen credits include The Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy (as Gibbs), De-Lovely, The Phantom of the Opera, Johnny English, Sliding Doors, Irish Jam, Entrapment and Valkyrie with Tom Cruise (film); Life On Mars, Bloodlines, Dunkirk, Spooks, Shackleton, Rab C Nesbitt, Enigma and Diana (TV).
They will be joined in the cast by other Donmar veterans – Peter Eyre (Murder in the Cathedral, Wild Duck) as the Ghost of Hamlet’s father/Player King; Matt Ryan (Small Change) as Horatio; Alex Waldmann (Grandage’s current production of Twelfth Night) as Laertes; and Ron Cook (also Twelfth Night plus Helpless, Juno and the Paycock, Glengarry Glen Ross) as Polonius.
The cast will also include Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Gethsemane) as Ophelia; Gwilym Lee (Oedipus) as Guildenstern; and John MacMillan (In the Red and Brown Water, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot) as Rosencrantz.
Hamlet will be designed by Christopher Oram, with lighting by Neil Austin and sound by Adam Cork.