Further casting has been announced for the upcoming tour of John Osborne’s funny and heartbreaking play The Entertainer starring Shane Richie as Archie Rice. Sara Crowe joins the cast to play Phoebe Rice and Diana Vickers to play Jean Rice.
Director Sean O’Connor, who has changed the setting of Osborne’s play for the very first time from 1957 to 1982, said: “I fell in love with Diana’s feisty but vulnerable LV in The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice when I saw it in the West End and am very excited about what she’ll bring to the role of Jean in The Entertainer, a young woman whose political conscience has been awakened by the Falklands war and who struggles in her combative relationship with her feckless father, Archie.”
“And I’ve long been an admirer of Sara’s extraordinary work and am thrilled that she is taking on one of Osborne’s greatest female roles as Phoebe, the hapless, hopeless wife of the washed up showman, Archie Rice.”
This new adaptation of The Entertainer will open at Curve in Leicester on 27 August 2019 and then tour the UK until 23 November, to Milton Keynes, Malvern, Plymouth, Woking, Eastbourne, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Brighton, Manchester, Bromley, Cheltenham and Shrewsbury.
1982: Archie Rice is a washed-up entertainer playing a summer season. As his soldier son sails with the Task Force to liberate the Falklands, his daughter Jean returns from campaigning against the war, and Archie’s professional and personal lives collide with devastating consequences.
