Sara Crowe and Diana Vickers are to join Shane Richie in the cast of John Osborne’s The Entertainer which will open at Curve, Leicester before a UK tour.
As previously announced, Richie will play Archie Rice. Crowe, who won an Olivier Award for best supporting actress for her role as Sybil in Noël Coward’s Private Lives at London’s Aldwych Theatre in 1990, will play Phoebe Rice.
Vickers, who first came to the public’s attention as a semi-finalist in The X Factor in 2008, will play Jean Rice. Previous stage work includes Alexander S Bermange’s I Wish My Life Were Like A Musical at London’s Brasserie Zedel in 2018, a part in Dan Paterson and Colin Swash’s The Duck House at the Vaudeville Theatre in 2013 and the lead in Jim Cartwright’s The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice at the same theatre in 2009.
Director Sean O’Connor, who has changed the setting of Osborne’s play 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 I’m 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’s 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, Leicester from Tuesday 27 until Saturday 31 August. It then tours to Milton Keynes, Malvern, Plymouth, Woking, Eastbourne, Wolverhampton, Coventry, Brighton, Manchester, Bromley, Cheltenham and Shrewsbury until 23 November.