Steven Blakeley, Laura Freeman and Sean O’Callaghan are to team up for Derby LIVE’s first in-house production since 2012.
They will appear in two comedies by Derbyshire writer Tim Elgood which are collectively being billed as Mad Dogs and an Englishman.
The Dog House and Bare Words will be staged in Derby’s Guildhall Theatre.
Derby LIVE, the entertainments arm of the city council, produced William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing in 2009 which featured Blakeley and Freeman. Both were born and raised in Derbyshire and attended Derby Playhouse youth and community theatres.
Blakeley and O’Callaghan faced each other in Elgood’s comedy Mother Came Too in 2010.
The pair get together again in The Dog House, described by Elgood as a “poignant comedy about a dog’s eye view of being rescued, homelessness and humans”.
In Bare Words, Blakeley is a tortured writer battling with words, his mother and himself to create his next big success. Freeman plays his tormenting muse who is his harshest critic.
Derby writer Tim Elgood recently won Long Play 2014, a playwriting competition for East Midlands writers organised by rural touring theatre company New Perspectives, for his work Unforgettable.
Derby LIVE’s creative producer Pete Meakin will direct the double bill. He directed the organisation's productions of The Taming of the Shrew in 2012, The Merchant of Venice in 2011 and Lucy Gannon’s Broken Hearted in 2010 as well as Much Ado About Nothing and Mother Came Too.
The Dog House and Bare Words run in the Guildhall Theatre from Friday 16 May until Saturday 31 May.