The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in association with Naked Productions and BBC Radio 3 have announced the cast for Sound Stage’s first production; Angela, a brand-new autobiographical play by Mark Ravenhill airing 26 – 28 March.
Angela centres on the playwright’s mother, at the age of 84 and suffering with dementia, as she looks back across her life. Intercutting between Angela in her old age, her memories and mind failing her, and in her youth; growing up, moving away from her roots as the world of drama welcomed her. The Play depicts her struggle with depression and the challenges of her own aspirations, and becoming a mother, poignantly set against Mark’s experience of beginning to learn ballet, his lifelong passion, in his fifties.
Performed by an exceptional cast, Angela stars Pam Ferris (Matilda, The Darling Buds of May, Rosemary and Thyme, Call The Midwife, Little Dorrit) and Matti Houghton (Call the Midwife, Manhunt, Law & Order, Luther) as Angela; BAFTA winner Toby Jones (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Hunger Games trilogy, Marvellous, Detectorists) as Ted; and Jackson Laing (The Boy in the Dress, Matilda; The Royal Shakespeare Company) and Joseph Millson (Angel Has Fallen, Dragonheart Vengeance, The Last Kingdom, Grantchester, Betrayal, Bath Theatre Royal; Mary Poppins, Cameron Mackintosh/Disney) as Mark.
The cast is completed by Nadia Albina, Dermot Daly, Raj Ghatak, Olivier Huband, Alexandra Mathie, and Kirsty Stuart.
Exquisitely observed and painfully honest, Angela is an emotive exploration of working-class motherhood in the 1960s, told by one of Britain’s best loved dramatists as we have never heard him before.
Playwright Mark Ravenhill said: “With the death of my mum in 2019, I was drawn for the first time to write an autobiographical play. I was particularly interested to explore the way culture high and low had impacted on Mum’s life and our lives as a family. The play is constructed around a series of encounters with children’s literature, classical ballet, amateur theatre, and popular song – encounters that shaped my mum’s sense of self and her relationship with me. Both my parents are from working class backgrounds which gives a specific turn to their relationship to culture and to me. As I thought about a form that could move swiftly in time and location and between inner thought and outer action, I realised that this was best written as a radio play. I feel it’s the most ‘radio’ of the radio plays that I’ve written…”
Tickets for Angela, along with the remaining seven Sound Stage productions, go on sale on 22nd February, and can be purchased through The Lyceum and Pitlochry Festival Theatre websites priced from £10 per play across the season.
