The Stage

Uma Thurman to star in BBC2 Hare adaptation

Published Thursday 19 June 2008 at 12:15 by Matthew Hemley

BBC2 has signed Hollywood star Uma Thurman to play a recovering alcoholic in an adaptation of David Hare’s stage play My Zinc Bed.

The drama will also feature Jonathan Pryce and Paddy Considine and is being directed by Anthony Page, the man behind the BBC’s 1994 television version of Middlemarch.

It tells the story of a poet called Paul Peplow, played by Considine, who is also a recovering alcoholic and who embarks on an affair with Thurman’s character Elsa Quinn, the wife of a wealthy internet entrepreneur who is Peplow’s new employer.

BBC2 is also adapting Caryl Churchill’s A Number, which will star Tom Wilkinson and Rhys Ifans as father and son, Salter and Bernard. However, their relationship is brought into question when Bernard learns he is just one of an unidentified number of clones.

BBC fiction controller Jane Tranter said the single play was “an integral part of the overall BBC drama picture”.

She said the BBC aimed to make and transmit around 26 original singles for television a year and added: “We’re delighted that this year plays from David Hare and Caryl Churchill, two of the UK’s most prolific and significant playwrights, have found their home on BBC2 and are helping to shine a light on the BBC’s overall commitment to the television single.”

The dramas have been adapted by their original playwrights and both are being made as part of a co-production deal with HBO Films.

Both are made by Rainmark Films, the company behind Primo, a one-off drama shown on BBC4 in January which starred Anthony Sher.