Cate Blanchett is to return to the UK stage for the first time in seven years when she makes her debut at the National Theatre in a new play by Martin Crimp.
It was announced on Wednesday that the Australian actor, who lives with her family in East Sussex, has been cast with Stephen Dillane in a production to be directed by Katie Mitchell.
Blanchett is an experienced stage actor and with her husband, Andrew Upton, was in charge of the Sydney Theatre Company from 2008-2013.
But the actor has been best known in recent years for her movie roles, including Blue Jasmine, Carol, the Hobbit films and Ocean’s 8. Her last UK stage appearance was at the Barbican in London in 2012 in Botho Strauss’s Big and Small.
Crimp’s play is called When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other – Twelve Variations on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Richardson’s Pamela, a kind of 18th-century Fifty Shades of Grey, is an epistolary novel about a young maid terrorised and imprisoned by a libertine nobleman. It caused a sensation after it was published in 1740 with its theme of love and marriage across the social divide.
The National Theatre said Crimp was using Pamela as a provocation with five characters acting out “a dangerous game of sexual domination and resistance”.
It said the play would break through “the surface of contemporary debate to explore the messy, often violent nature of desire, and the fluid, complicated roles that men and women play”.
Blanchett’s co-star Dillane, who played Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones and Viscount Halifax in The Darkest Hour, is returning to the National for the first time since The Coast of Utopia in 2002 and reuniting with Mitchell after productions which include Endgame, Uncle Vanya, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and Four Quartets.
Mitchell, regarded by some as a theatre visionary and one of Britain’s finest living stage directors, has not directed at the National since the brutally shocking production of Cleansed in 2016.
She said: “It’s great to be working with Martin again on this powerful new text and to continue my special collaboration with Stephen Dillane. At the same time I’m delighted to welcome Cate Blanchett to the National, and look forward to developing a new working relationship with this extraordinary actor.”
Blanchett had been rumoured to be starring in a forthcoming West End production of All About Eve, directed by Ivo van Hove, but reportedly withdrew because of a scheduling conflict.
The National Theatre said more information on the Crimp play, which opens in January 2019, would be announced in the autumn when tickets go on sale.
