Michael Hugo, a regular at Newcastle-under-Lyme’s New Vic, is heading back to the Staffordshire theatre-in-the-round with Northern Broadsides for a new version of a dark comedy.
Northern Broadsides associate director Conrad Nelson and playwright Deborah McAndrew have teamed up to adapt Nikolai Erdman’s The Suicide, which has the new title The Grand Gesture.
The play involves working-class, unemployed and desperate Simeon Duff wanting to end it all. When word gets out, a host of people want to claim his suicide as a grand gesture for their own cause. But will Duff really go through with it?
Hugo plays Duff. His New Vic credits include Phileas Fogg’s manservant in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days in 2013, Joseph Poorgrass in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, Alecky Blythe’s Where Have I Been all My Life? in 2012, the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in 2011 and the lead role in Peter Pan in 2010.
The rest of the cast comprises Hester Arden, who was in the Northern Broadsides production of Love’s Labour’s Lost at the New Vic, as Rosie Philpot, Angela Bain (Sadie), Paul Barnhill (George Timms), Sophia Hatfield (Chloe MacSween), Alan McMahon (Father McCloud), Dyfrig Morris (Nicholas Pugh), Rob Pickavance (Victor Stark), Samantha Robinson (Mary Duff), Howard Chadwick (Al Bush) and Claire Storey (Maggie Johnson).
Presented by Northern Broadsides in partnership with Harrogate Theatre, The Grand Gesture runs at the New Vic from Tuesday (29 October) until Saturday 9 November.