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Women taking the lead at Royal Court next year
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent6 Nov 2008
Miranda Richardson, Jane Horrocks and Mark Rylance are among the stars of 2009 season at the Royal Court, announced today.
Horrocks and Richardson will be joined by Clare Higgins in a run of work by American actor and playwright Wallace Shawn.
Richardson joins Shawn, whose early work was championed by the Royal Court, in his first new play for 10 years - Grasses Of A Thousand Colours.
In Aunt Dan And Lemon, Horrocks plays Lemon, looking back on her childhood and the influence of her charismatic but opinionated aunt.
Higgins stars in one-woman show The Fever, as an idealistic traveller whose liberal ideas are shattered as she learns the impact her life has had on the world.
Shawn said: "I feel unexpectedly plucked from obscurity like Barack Obama. I always thought there was something to me but it's terribly nice to think that somebody else does." Rylance, former artistic director of the Globe, will star in Jerusalem, a new work set in contemporary rural Britain by Jez Butterworth.
The season will also include new plays by Polly Stenham and Mark Ravenhill - both named most promising playwrights in past Evening Standard Theatre Awards. Stenham, 22, follows her audacious debut That Face, about dysfunctional upper-middle-class parent-children relations, with Tusk Tusk, an examination of siblings.
She said: "Everyone talks about [the difficulties] of your second play and I sweated blood over this."
Ravenhill, writer of Shopping And F***ing, and the German Marius von Mayenburg, have both produced plays marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Dominic Cooke, the Royal Court's artistic director, said the programme continued his exploration of "where you take political theatre in an age when, even with the credit crunch and despite disparities, we have been affluent and comfortable for a long time".
Ruth Jones, co-writer of BBC hit Gavin And Stacey, is to be patron of the Court's Young Writers' Festival, which has produced Alia Bano and Molly Davies, whose work is in the new programme.
Jones, who was encouraged to apply to drama school by Mr Cooke, said: "I know how life-changing it can be when somebody says they like your stuff."
