Daisy Edgar-Jones is to star in a new production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof directed by Rebecca Frecknall at London’s Almeida theatre. It will be the third Tennessee Williams play staged by Frecknall at the illustrious venue in Islington, north London. It will follow her versions of Summer and Smoke in 2018 and A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Edgar-Jones’s Normal People co-star Paul Mescal, in 2023. Both of those shows transferred to the West End and won Olivier awards.
Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lennie James will also appear in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which won Williams his second Pulitzer prize for drama. First staged in 1955, it takes place on a sweltering evening in the deep south and explores the divisions in a family assembled for the formidable Big Daddy’s birthday. In Frecknall’s version, James will play the patriarch, Ben-Adir his alcoholic, grief-stricken son Brick and Edgar-Jones takes on the part of Maggie the Cat, Brick’s desperately frustrated wife.
The play, which opens on 10 December and runs until 1 February, will bring Edgar-Jones back to the theatre where she starred in Albion in 2020. She has since established a film career that includes Twisters and On Swift Horses, which premiered at the Toronto international film festival this month.
Next summer, Frecknall will direct a lesser-staged American classic, A Moon for the Misbegotten, at the Almeida. Eugene O’Neill’s heated family drama explores similar themes to Williams’s play and is a sequel to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Ruth Wilson and Michael Shannon will star in the production, which runs from 17 June to 16 August. The new season at the Almeida also includes Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist satire Rhinoceros, directed and newly translated by Omar Elerian. It runs from 25 March to 26 April.
Two new plays are also to premiere at the theatre. Otherland, written by Chris Bush (Standing at the Sky’s Edge) and directed by Ann Yee, depicts a break-up and “explores what it means to be true to yourself in the face of unstoppable change”. It runs from 11 February to 15 March. Ava Pickett’s 1536, which won this year’s Susan Smith Blackburn prize for female, transgender and non-binary playwrights, will be directed at the Almeida by Lyndsey Turner. It unfolds in Tudor Essex in the wake of Anne Boleyn’s arrest. The judges for the prize acknowledged its portrayal of a “rising tide of puritanical misogyny”. Pickett said: “I wrote this play from a place of fury, love and hunger to see more of the beauty and brutality of friendship on stage.” It runs from 6 May to 7 June.