Luce - Natasha Gordon replaces Josette Simon
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
NATASHA Gordon has replaced Josette Simon in the UK première of JC Lee’s Luce, which runs at Southwark Playhouse from March 11 (previews from March 9) to April 2, 2016.
Josette Simon has had to withdraw from the production for personal reasons. Read more about the newly announced cast.
Previously Posted: Simon Dormandy will direct Mel Giedroyc (as Amy) and Josette Simon (Harriet) in the UK première of JC Lee’s Luce, which runs at Southwark Playhouse from March 11 (previews from March 9) to April 2, 2016.
Amy’s son is perfect: star athlete, academic highflyer and high school hero. So why are there lethal explosives in his locker?
Luce is about the fear of homegrown terrorism. Set in an ordinary American town, but addressing anxieties that are growing throughout the Western world, it raises troubling questions about parenting, education and racism. Do we ever really know our children? Why must they be perfect? And where do the springs of violence lie?
Mel Giedroyc is an actress, comedian and presenter, best known for her comedy work with Sue Perkins. She has co-hosted television series such as Mel & Sue, Light Lunch and The Great British Bake Off, and was seen on ITV’s Christmas Day broadcast of The Sound of Music Live!, a new television dramatisation of the world’s most popular musical. Her other stage credits include New Boy (Trafalgar Studios) and Eurobeat (Novello Theatre).
Josette Simon was awarded an OBE for services to drama in 2000. Her extensive theatre credits include After the Fall at the National Theatre, for which she won Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards, and an Olivier Award Nomination for Best Actress. For the RSC, her credits include Golden Girls (Plays and Players Award for Best Actress), Don Carlos, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Measure for Measure, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Antony & Cleopatra, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth and Peer Gynt.
Her theatre credits elsewhere include The Maids (Donmar Warehouse), The Lady from the Sea (Lyric Hammersmith) and The Vagina Monologues (Old Vic).
Simon’s screen credits include Death in Paradise, Spooks, Law and Order UK, Suspects, Merlin, New Tricks, Silent Witness, The Return, Minder, Skins, Whistleblowers, Lewis, Midsomer Murders, Agatha Christie: Poirot, Dalziel and Pascoe and Henry IV – Parts I & II (TV); Red Lights (with Robert de Niro and Sigourney Weaver), A Child from the South, Cry Freedom, Milk and Honey (Paris Film Festival and Atlantic Film Festival Awards for Best Actress), Dardanelle, Bridge of Time and When Love Dies (film).
Simon Dormandy recently adapted and co-directed The Hudsucker Proxy, a Complicite, Liverpool Everyman and Nuffield Theatre production based on the Coen Brothers’ film. His other recent credits include The Encounter (Complicite), Shangri-La (Finborough Theatre) and Waiting for Godot and Eldorado (Arcola Theatre). He has also taught and directed at leading London drama schools and at Eton College, where his pupils included Eddie Redmayne and Tom Hiddleston.
JC Lee was recently a writer and co-producer for Looking on HBO, where he previously wrote for Girls and is in development on his dark comedy Bad Kids with Peter Berg. He’s currently writing the screen adaptation for the musical Pippin for the Weinstein Company and ABC’s How To Get Away With Murder.
Presented by Frankie Parham and Oliver King for Fuse Theatre (by special arrangement with Samuel French Ltd), Luce is designed by Dick Bird, an award-winning designer whose last collaboration with Simon Dormandy, The Hudsucker Proxy, won Best Design at the 2015 UK Theatre Awards.
Tickets: £20, £16 concessions. Previews (March 9 and 10) all tickets £12. To book, call the box office on 020 7407 0234 or visit www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/.
Times: Monday to Saturday at 8pm, Tuesday and Saturday matinees at 3.30pm.
Also at Southwark Playhouse: Orphans by Lyle Kessler (until March 5, 2016).