Leading ladies top the bill in Young Vic's new season

Actresses Juliet Stevenson and Gillian Anderson head the line-up for the Young Vic's 2014 season
Star line-up: Gillian Anderson will star in Streetcar
27 September 2013

Women will take centre stage at the Young Vic in a season dominated by female performers and directors.

Actresses Juliet Stevenson and Gillian Anderson head the line-up for the theatre’s 2014 season, which will also see the return of some of its most successful female directors.

Stevenson, 56, will star in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, in which the character Winnie is buried up to her waist in earth.

She will be directed by Natalie Abrahami, making her debut on the Young Vic’s biggest stage following an acclaimed After Miss Julie last year.

Anderson, 45, will make her Young Vic debut playing Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire — only her fourth London stage appearance.

And Katie Mitchell, who directed her first Chekhov piece, Uncle Vanya, at the Young Vic in 1998, will return with the only major work by the Russian she has not yet done, The Cherry Orchard.

Stevenson, a previous Olivier Award winner, praised Young Vic artistic director David Lan for giving women a showcase in the season, announced today: “It’s really wonderful to see a season like that. David puts his money where his mouth is. It’s fantastic.”

She said it was exciting to take on the challenge of Beckett, adding: “It’s amazing writing. And there’s not an amazing amount of amazing writing about — and certainly not for actresses of my age group.”

Meanwhile, demand for tickets for Kander and Ebb musical The Scottsboro Boys, directed by the award-winning American Susan Stroman, has already proved so strong the run has been extended until Christmas.

And it was announced today that the Young Vic’s hit production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, starring Hattie Morahan and directed by Carrie Cracknell, is to transfer to New York at the end of its current West End run.

Men are not excluded from the new season. Veteran director Peter Brook returns with a new show, The Valley of Astonishment.And acclaimed Belgian Ivo van Hove will direct Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge.

Priority booking for friends of the theatre opens today, public booking from October 7, www.youngvic.org

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