Home Top

BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Billie faces emotional turmoil in new play about how infertility can damage a relationship

Published: 23:47 GMT, 12 May 2016 | Updated: 23:55 GMT, 12 May 2016

View
comments

Billie Piper will explore the strains on a woman unable to have a baby and how infertility can damage a relationship in a new version of a classic play.

The actress, a mother of two sons, will star in a modern adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Yerma.

Australian playwright Simon Stone has shifted Lorca’s drama from a rural Spanish setting to contemporary London.

In the original, Yerma is a married peasant woman who endures unbearable psychological and cultural challenges when she finds that she’s infertile.

Scroll down for video

Billie Piper will explore the strains on a woman unable to have a baby in a modern adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Yerma

Piper told me, in a statement, that she believes the play is ‘hugely relevant in our modern world of female pressure, expectations, and love lost as a result’. She called it ‘another sad yet beautiful observation of men and women, and the stuff that sets us apart’.

Piper, who was last seen on stage in Richard Bean’s satire Great Britain at the National Theatre two years ago, was eager to point out that the piece would not be all tragedy.

Stone, who is also directing, is thought a bit of a wunderkind in his native Australia; and a brilliant adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck a couple of years ago at the Barbican proved that it wasn’t just idle chat.

His directorial film debut, The Daughter, starring Geoffrey Rush and Miranda Otto (so good as treacherous Allison in the last Homeland series), opens here on May 27.

Piper’s eclectic choices are just as exciting. On TV she went from Dr Who to Jane Austen to Penny Dreadful, the smart horror series on Sky Atlantic in which she plays Lily, the supposed Bride of Frankenstein.

in the theatre she has collaborated with the best directors in the land, including Nick Hytner, Rupert Goold, Michael Attenborough and Laurence Boswell.

Yerma has its first performance at the Young Vic on July 28 and runs till September 24.

Watch out for...

Louise Dearman and Laura Pitt-Pulford, who will star in the musical Side Show as real-life conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton at the Southwark Playhouse. The show has a score by Henry Krieger (who did Dreamgirls) and book and lyrics by Bill Russell.

This version, originally staged in New York in 1997, will include additional material written by Bill Condon when he directed a revival on Broadway in 2014.

Louise Dearman (right) and Laura Pitt-Pulford, will star in the musical Side Show as real-life conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton at the Southwark Playhouse

The Hilton sisters used their physical appearance as the hook for their music hall act, which toured the U.S. in the Thirties.

It’s a great show about the dark side of showbusiness and I’ve always felt it would work best in a small venue like Southwark. Hannah Chissick will direct, with Matthew Cole choreographing. Producer Paul Taylor Mills said Krieger and Russell may come to London to revise some of their work before previews start on October 21.

Nigel Lindsay, so good when he played Shrek at the Drury Lane, who will take over from Richard Kind as Nathan Detroit in Guys And Dolls at the Phoenix Theatre from May 24. The production, directed by Gordon Greenberg, started at Chichester Festival Theatre, moved to the Savoy, and then divided into two: with one company going on tour, and the other scooting off to the Phoenix.