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BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Kim's back on stage - and she'll be epic! Sex and the City star to appear in West End play

Published: 20:05 EST, 16 July 2015 | Updated: 20:32 EST, 16 July 2015

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Kim Cattrell will play the title role in Linda, a new play by Penelope Skinner at the Royal Court Theatre

Kim Cattrall is returning to the London stage in a role that promises to be as epic as some of the great theatre parts written for men.

The actress will play the title role in Linda, a new play by Penelope Skinner that will start previews at the Royal Court Theatre on November 25 before opening on December 1.

Linda is a top marketing executive at a British beauty company, married with two daughters who, on the face of it, seems to have it all. But at the age of 55 she realises, with a shock, that her career — and her home life — has hit a wall.

Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the Royal Court, told me how she, Cattrall and Skinner wanted a play that featured a female character as flawed and mythic as Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron — the part Mark Rylance created so memorably in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (which also started life at the Court).

‘We adore him!’ she said of Rooster.

Featherstone pointed out that Greek tragedies such as Medea and Antigone had epic roles for a leading actress, but few contemporary dramas did.

She rattled off a list of classics — King Lear, Death Of A Salesman, A View From The Bridge — featuring male protagonists who were ‘not fully likeable’, yet these ‘really flawed characters are allowed to become epic heroes’.

(The title for Skinner’s play comes from Linda Loman — Willy Loman’s wife in Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman.)

And Featherstone argued that there should be roles just as powerful for women — and that our great actresses should not be sentenced to a lifetime of playing ‘nice and pleasing’ parts.

She longed for heroines who ‘are difficult and complex and go on flawed journeys, the way that these men have’.

Linda should be a perfect fit for Cattrall, who used to play Samantha Jones in Sex and the City on TV and who returns to the stage as often as she can (she was sublime in Sweet Bird Of Youth at the Old Vic two years ago). Featherstone said Cattrall, now 58, is ‘brilliantly fierce about not being a young woman any more . . . and not fierce in a vain way’.

‘She’s taken control of her life and is not sitting back,’ she commented about the way the actress has refused to let Hollywood define her.

Featherstone added that in Skinner’s darkly comic drama, Linda believed she was making the world a better place for other women. ‘Linda won awards for a campaign which was about redefining beauty for ordinary women,’ Featherstone explained.

But it dawns on her that her daughters have not turned out to be young feminists, her husband is distant and a younger version of herself — but without her ideals — is after her job.

Michael Longhurst, who directed Nick Payne’s play Constellations, will direct Linda.

A funny superstar

Sheridan Smith told me she’s excited and nervous about playing Fanny Brice in Funny Girl at the Menier Chocolate Factory.

Rehearsals start in October, with performance dates to be fixed. As I said when I broke this story, it will make her an international name.

Michael Ball and Rebecca LaChance, who play the title characters Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand

Watch out for...

Michael Ball and Rebecca LaChance, who play the real-life title characters Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand in the musical Mack & Mabel, which is previewing at the Chichester Festival Theatre, where it opens officially on Tuesday.

Jonathan Church’s beautiful production captures the hell-for-leather efforts of creating cinema in the pioneering years of Hollywood movie-making.

Jerry Herman’s music and lyrics, and Michael Stewart’s book — revised by novelist Francine Pascal — tell the poignant story of Sennett, who shot early two-reel comedies, but who couldn’t tell Normand, his troubled leading lady, that he loved her.

Ball just gets better and better as a theatre artist — he disappears into the role of Sennett.

LaChance’s portrait of Normand is moving, but is streaked with humour, too.

Director Church has assembled a first-rate creative team to design and light, and choreographer Stephen Mear proves that he is a star in his own right: his musical staging of cream pie fights, Keystone Kops, bathing beauties and tap dancers (led by Anna-Jayne Casey) is brilliant.