John Heffernan and Anna Maxwell Martin will play the lead roles in Macbeth at Birmingham REP in Carrie Cracknell and Lucy Guerin’s new staging of Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Anna Maxwell Martin will be appearing at the REP for the first time. She won BAFTA best actress awards for her role in the BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and for her performance in the television film version of Claire Allan’s novel about mental illness, Poppy Shakespeare.
On stage, she played Isabella in Measure for Measure at the Almeida Theatre in 2010 and Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue in 2006.
John Heffernan is also making his first appearance at the REP. He played J Robert Oppenheimer in the RSC production of Tom Morton-Smith’s Oppenheimer in 2015 and took the lead role in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II at the National Theatre.
The cast of Macbeth also includes Mark Ebulue, Thomasin Gulgec, Ira Mandela Siobhan, Ana Beatriz Meireles, Prasanna Puwanarajah and Clemmie Sveaas.
A co-production with the Young Vic and HOME in Manchester, Macbeth will run at Birmingham REP from Tuesday 26 until Saturday 30 January.