The Coronet Theatre has announced that the cast for master playwright Brian Friel’s Afterplay, directed by John Haidar, will be Mariah Gale and Rory Keenan
When Andrey and Sonya were young they were told how their lives should be – marriage, children and happily ever after. Decades later they meet by chance in a Moscow café. Their dreams have given way to a rather different reality. When they look in a mirror, someone they don’t recognise looks back. In the course of their encounter, they catch sight of what might have been, and the possibility of a different future.
Brian Friel is widely regarded as one of Ireland’s greatest dramatists, having written over 30 plays across six decades and won may major accolades.
Ian Charleson Award winner Mariah Gale’s career on stage includes Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Ophelia in Hamlet, and Miranda in The Tempest (RSC), Eden (Hampstead Theatre), Measure For Measure (The Globe), Proof (Menier Chocolate Factory), ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (Southwark Playhouse) Twelfth Night (Regent’s Park) and Three Sisters (Young Vic). TV work includes January 22nd, Dr Who, Lucky Man, Broadchurch, The Hollow Crown, Death Comes to Pemberly. In film Rare Beasts, Hercules, Abraham’s Point and Hamlet.
Irish actor Rory Keenan has worked extensively on stage and screen. His most recent of many stage appearances include in Plenty (Chichester Festival Theatre), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (West End/ BAM New York), Saint Joan (Donmar Warehouse) and The Seagull (Corn Exchange, Dublin). On TV he has appeared in Versailles, Come Home, Striking Out, War and Peace, Peaky Blinders and Birdsong. Film work includes Boski Plan, Refriending, The Young Messiah, Grimsby, Take Down, Second Coming, The Guard and Ella Enchanted.
Director John Haidar’s credits include Othello (Cambridge Arts Theatre), Dick Whittington (Theatre Royal Stratford East), Richard III (Headlong), Mercury Fur, Saved (Guildhall), Disco Pigs (Trafalgar Studios and Irish Repertory Theatre, New York), Last of the Boys (Southwark Playhouse), The Little Match Girl (Birmingham REP and UK Tour) and The New Electric Ballroom (RADA). As associate/assistant director, his credits include: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Harold Pinter Theatre); The Plough and the Stars (National Theatre); Photograph 51 (Noël Coward Theatre).
In his masterful one-act play Friel revisits characters from Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, and hauntingly evokes what might have happened next to two of Anton Chekhov’s most iconic characters.
