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After the pandemic derailed her 2020 plans to star in classic musical Hello, Dolly! we had to wait a full four years for stage and screen legend and all round national treasure Imelda Staunton to finally bring it to the West End.
But with her role as the elder incarnation of Elizabeth II in The Crown now fully wrapped up and no longer consuming her time, Staunton is returning to the London well under a year after Hello, Dolly! closed, to reunite with its director Dominic Cooke for a revival of the George Bernard Shaw classic Mrs Warren’s Profession.
And this time she’s brought family. Staunton’s actor daughter Bessie Carter has been carving out a name for herself mostly on screen, with her most notable role probably that of Prudence in Bridgerton. This year she flexes her West End muscles for the first time, as the real life mother and daughter star as fictional mother and daughter the Warrens in Shaw’s great drama about the generational clash between the very ‘modern’ Vivie, determined to carve out an unconventional career for herself as a lawyer, and her mother Kitty, who believes in profiting from the old, patriarchal order.
It’s the third show Cooke has directed Staunton in – after Hello, Dolly! and the National Theatre’s sublime Follies – but the first non-musical. Whatever the case, it should be a treat: Staunton is one of those performers so good that pretty much everything she touches turns to gold.
Mrs Warren’s Profession is at the Garrick Theatre, May 10-Aug 16. Sign up here to be alerted when tickets go on sale.
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