The Stage

Daldrey to direct David Hare double bill at Suffolk theatrical festival

Published Tuesday 10 March 2009 at 16:10 by Lalayn Baluch

Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry is set to direct David Hare’s latest double bill as part of Suffolk’s HighTide Festival this spring.

The plays Berlin and Wall, which received premieres at the National Theatre and Royal Court Theatre earlier this year, will be performed by Hare himself.

The festival - scheduled to run from April 27 to May 10 - will also feature the premiere of Guardian, a new play by Lucy Caldwell, whose debut work Leaves won the George Devine Award in 2006. The production will be directed by Natalie Abrahami, joint artistic director of London’s Gate Theatre.

Other HighTide premieres include Lydia Adetunji’s comedy Fixer, which will be staged in a non-theatre space as a promenade performance, and Jesse Weaver’s work Muhmah.

Royal Shakespeare Company and NT director Katie Mitchell is programmed to direct One Evening, a fully staged performance of Samuel Beckett’s poetry with Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, which will be performed by Mark Padmore in a new English translation by Whitbread-winning poet Michael Symmons Roberts.

Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington will travel to HighTide to look back at 50 years of British theatre, using excerpts from his book State of the Nation, which won the Society for Theatre Research’s Theatre Book Prize last year.