The Late Middle Classes

Helen McCrory returns to the Donmar to play Celia, the frustrated housewife in Simon Gray's The Late Middle Classes, a play which deals in the hidden secrets and guilt felt by a middle-class family in 1950s England. Celia, desperate for distraction, fills her time with tennis and gin while her husband Charles, a pathologist, is buried in his work among the living and the dead. Their son, Holly, is being taught more than just piano lessons by his tutor Brownlow (Robert Glenister) - lessons in life. Denied a West End run in 1999 by a short lived musical called Boyband ("an act of betrayal" and a "disgrace to English theatre" according to the play's director Harold Pinter), The Late Middle Classes makes its West End debut over a decade after it won best new play of the year at the Barclays Theatre Awards. This time around it's David Leveaux in the director's seat, the man responsible for Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals Starlight Express and The Woman in White as well as numerous West End stagings including Time, Sinatra at the London Palladium and Hitchcock Blonde. His previous Donmar productions include The Real Thing (which won a Tony Award for Best Revival), Nine and Electra.