Chit chat - Captain’s log

Published Monday 4 August 2008 at 18:10 by Tabard

And, while we’re on the subject of famous faces lending a helping hand, Tabard was impressed to hear that Patrick Stewart has recently taken time out of his gruelling Hamlet schedule, in which he is playing Claudius, to record a voice-over for an experimental piece of theatre opening at the Barbican in September.

The show, called Helium, won the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award and is produced by upcoming theatre company Slung Low. The run at the Barbican marks the first time they will have mounted a show in the capital.

So, how did they go about landing such a star name to play the voice of the digital lead character?

They just asked.

“We’d come up with the idea for the show, in which several of the characters are created digitally, and were writing a list of people who we wanted for the voices. Patrick Stewart’s name just kept coming up. So, we took a chance and just asked him to do it,” explains the show’s director Alan Lane.

“He said yes, if he could find the time, and we went down to Stratford and recorded it after what had been a busy day of rehearsals for him.”

It turned out, though, that Stewart did in fact have a link to the company. As well as being an acclaimed stage actor and captain of the Starship Enterprise, Stewart is also chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, where Slung Low happen to be company in residence.