Sheridan Smith

Confirming the date via her Twitter page, Smith will leave the show on 23 October 2010. Producers of the show are auditioning a number of actresses for the lead part of Elle Woods in the stage adaptation of the hit movie Legally Blonde.

Sheridan Smith is best known for her TV roles including Two Pints of Lager & A Packet of Crisps, Grown Ups, Love Soup, Benidorm, The Royle Family and Gavin and Stacey.

She has recently been filming a one-act Chekhov play for Sky Arts alongside Gavin and Stacey cast mate Matthew Horne. The play, The Proposal, is part of a short series celebrating the 150th anniversary of the playrwight, to be broadcast this November.

Sheridan also performed recently in a workshop version of a new musical based on Helen Fielding’s book Bridget Jones’s Diary, with music by Lily Allen. Stephen Daldry, director of the film and stage version of  Billy Elliot, will helm the project if it goes ahead. The show would also reunite Daldry with producers of the Bridget Jones and Billy Elliot films and stage shows Working Title Films, plus choreographer Peter Darling.

Book tickets to Legally Blonde at the Savoy Theatre in London

The shock waves created by John Osborne’s seminal Look Back In Anger (1956) in the hitherto cosy post-war British theatre, had a mini boost two years later with the appearance of Shelagh Delaney’s in-your-face A Taste of Honey, and a seismic one six years after that with the arrival of an iconoclastic playwright bovver boy called Joe Orton.

His first play, Entertaining Mr Sloane certainly brought a blush to the cheeks of easily shockable Aunt Ednas everywhere whose ideal West End play was The Chalk Garden or anything by Terence Rattigan. Indeed, it was Rattigan who championed Mr. Sloane after its controversial premiere in 1964, recognising in its young author an exhilaratingly fresh, albeit shocking tone of voice that could simultaneously ruffle feathers as well as excitingly raise the hairs on the back of the neck.

In synopsis, the plot couldn’t be sleazier. Mr. Sloane, a physically attractive young thug exploits a middle-aged brother and sister, murders their decrepit old father, after which he is blackmailed into sexually servicing both siblings. Orton’s achievement isn’t simply pushing the boundaries of bad taste to a degree hitherto foreign to British playwriting, but the stylised language he uses to leaven the sleaze and, of course, the humour he draws from the situation. For years it has been fashionable to compare his use of language with Oscar Wilde’s; the high-toned formality appliqued onto mundane thoughts, inspired flashes of wit, elegant phrases camouflaging inelegant thoughts. And, above all, a liberating expose of, in Orton’s case, lower middle-class hypocrisy.

Orton is particularly in his element with the character of the misogynistic gay brother Ed whose pompous veneer of respectability and many double-entendres provide some delicious verbal pyrotechnics. Kath, the forty-ish sister who picks up Mr. Sloane in a library, brings him back home, changes into a see-through negligée and promptly seduces him, offers much comic ballast as well.

As played in director Nick Bagnall’s enjoyable revival, a moustachioed Simon Paisley Day and the wonderful Imelda Staunton excavate a gloriously Ortonesque vein of controlled comic acting, and Richard Bremmer is appropriately doddery as the elderly father Kemp. My only reservation is Matthew Horne’s uncharismatic Mr. Sloane. Neither sexy nor particularly menacing – two essential qualities for Sloane – it’s hard, in Horne’s performance, to justify what the verbal and physical sparring for possession of his body is all about.

Fortunately the production – with its atmospherically decaying set by Peter McKintosh – survives this flaw. But what could have been a superlative revival is now merely a good one.

ENTERTAINING MR SLOANE Trafalgar Studios, London

CLIVE HIRSCHHORN.  Courtesy of This Is London.

BOOK TICKETS AT WESTENDTHEATRE.COM

If theatre mirrors life then you would expect 2009 to be a bad year for the performing arts in London: economic downturns and credit crunches sound like gloomy news for our discretionary entertainment spending. But West End theatre box office figures have kept on going up in recent years, and the huge number of new productions sailing into town during 2009 could mean that Theatreland manages to buck the trend.

THE GREAT REVIVAL

The RSC, National Theatre, Donmar and Old Vic dominated straight drama in the West End in 2008, and they haven’t finished yet. Big hitters coming to town include Judi Dench and Rosamund Pike in the Donmar in the West End’s Madame de Sade at the Wyndhams; Jude Law offering us his, hopefully fighting fit, Hamlet; Gillian Anderson in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Rachel Weisz in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Donmar Warehouse; Helen Mirren making her return to the London stage in Phaedra at the National Theatre; and a number of crowd-pleasing revivals at the Old Vic, no more so than Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel’s hugely successful play starring Andrea Corr, and Sam Mendes directing Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, both featuring Ethan Hawke, Simon Russell Beale and Sinead Cusack.

STAR POWER

Other stars shimmying into town include Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Haymarket, Ken Stott and Hayley Atwell in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Duke of York’s, heavy-hitter Pete Postlethwaite as King Lear at the Young Vic, and Antony Sher giving us his Prospero in the RSC’s The Tempest. The Gavin and Stacey phenomenon continues to roll on, as we see Joe Orton’s delicious romp Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Trafalgar Studios starring Gavin himself, Matthew Horne, alongside Imelda Staunton; whilst Gavin’s onscreen Mum Alison Steadman plays a barking Leeds housewife in Alan Bennett’s Enjoy at the Gielgud Theatre.

NEW PLAYS

The sharp eyed amongst you will notice that all of these plays are revivals rather than new work, keeping audiences firmly in their comfort zones. That said, new plays may be thin on the ground but not absent all together, with the National offering up Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice, following two lovers across four centuries, and Samuel Adamson’s Mrs Affleck set in the 1950s. Jez Butterworth has two new plays in pre-production, with comedy Parlour Song at the Almeida and Jerusalem at the Royal Court. Also at the Royal Court, Mark Ravenhill will bring his new play Over There. Plus Hollywood man of the moment James McAvoy is to star in Richard Greenberg’s acclaimed play Three Days of Rain at the Apollo, and at The Old Vic Richard Dreyfuss headlines the world premiere of American playwright Joe Sutton’s new play Complicit, directed by Kevin Spacey.

“BASED ON A FILM”

In musical theatre, 2009 promises to be a year of great big fabulous and familiar shows, surely enough to see us through the dark times? And it’s no coincidence that many of them are based on hugely successful films.

Oliver! will be well and truly steaming ahead through 2009 at the Drury Lane Theatre Royal with Rowan Atkinson and Jodie Prenger; La Cage Aux Folles will continue camping it up at the Playhouse but with Graham Norton taking over from Douglas Hodge; and at the Adelphi Theatre Lee Mead will bow out of Joseph to be replaced by Gareth Gates.

Jason Donovan will be donning the wigs and lip gloss to take us on an Australian power-mince in Priscilla Queen of the Desert at the Palace Theatre. And Sister Act at the London Palladium will be doing its best to recreate the fun of the film, helped along by Whoopi Goldberg as co-producer. And not quite a musical but as good as, Calendar Girls the stage play will up the naked flesh quotient in the West End, starring Patricia Hodge and Lynda Bellingham at the Noel Coward Theatre.

Also in musicals-land the power of reality TV continues to wield its power, with Gareth Gates going into Joseph at the Adelphi Theatre, the X-factor’s Niki Evans continuing in Blood Brothers at the Phoenix, Jodie Prenger in Oliver at the Drury Lane, and Ray Quinn and Danny Bayne in Grease – joined for a limited time by the legendary Jimmy Osmond.

KIDS RULE

Kids should also see a good year in 2009 with an enormous live theatrical production of Walking with Dinosaurs coming to a stadium near you, and War Horse transfers from its successful run at the National Theatre to the New London Theatre.

Book these show