Jermyn Street Theatre has announced the full cast of The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! by Peepolykus co-artistic director John Nicholson.
Joining the previously announced Call The Midwife star Jennifer Kirby in the title role, will be an ensemble of three – Sam Alexander (The Homecoming – Bath Theatre Royal, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof – English Touring Theatre), Alistair Cope (People Places and Things – National Theatre/Headlong, The Sound of Heavy Rain – Paines Plough) and Dennis Herdman (The Play What I Wrote – Birmingham Rep / David Pugh Associates, Around The World in Eighty Days – Kenny Wax Productions). Together, they will play a rich array of other characters in this irreverent and uproarious take on Gustave Flaubert’s celebrated 1856 novel. The production runs from 17 November to 17 December.
“Don’t you think the world looks different this morning?”
Emma Bovary is bored. She’s bored with her boring doctor husband, bored with her boring provincial village, and bored with her role as a dutiful wife in (boring) nineteenth-century France. But Emma reads novels. Lots of novels. And in novels, life is considerably more riotous… In Jermyn Street Theatre’s Christmas production, a small cast of actors battle hilarious mishaps and misbehaving props to tell the (massively) tragic story of Madame Bovary.
When his seminal work was first published in mid-nineteenth century France, Flaubert was prosecuted for obsecenity. Now this scandalous chronicle of marital breakdown and domestic tragedy is hailed as one of the best novels ever written. Orginally written for Peepolykus and previously staged in Liverpool and Bristol, John Nicholson’s adaptation employs his trademark ridiculous and anarchic humour to stage this classic novel as a breakneck comical romp.
Director, Marieke Audsley makes her Jermyn Street Theatre debut, whilst Nicholson returns to the theatre following the staging of his smash hit The Hound of the Baskervilles there in 2017.
