Billy Crudup is to make his West End theatre debut portraying 19 characters in a solo show about a charismatic American trickster posing as a Londoner.
Written by David Cale, the one-man play Harry Clarke was first performed by Crudup off-Broadway in 2017. It follows a midwestern barista who beguiles a wealthy New York family while pretending to be a British representative of the singer Sade. “It’s part charm show, it’s part thrill ride, and then it’s a claustrophobic attack in the style of film noir,” Crudup told the San Jose News when he reprised the part at Berkeley Repertory theatre last year.
The star of Almost Famous, Big Fish and The Morning Show, Crudup won several awards for the play after it was staged at the Vineyard theatre in New York in 2017 by Leigh Silverman, who will also direct the London run at the Ambassadors theatre. Jesse Green, in the New York Times, hailed Crudup’s performance and called it “a sly role terrifically suited to his gifts”. In 2018, the play was staged at New York’s Minetta Lane theatre, sponsored by Audible, which captured Crudup’s performance as an audio drama.
On Broadway, Crudup has starred in two productions of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, 16 years apart, and in two parts of Stoppard’s trilogy The Coast of Utopia. From 2013-14 he shared the stage with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in both Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land by Harold Pinter.
It is 20 years since he starred in Stage Beauty, a film set in London’s 17th-century theatres. Crudup said: “I love London and I have loved seeing theatre in London for decades. West End theatregoers are some of the most discerning, intelligent and hungry audiences in the world. I’m grateful to be given the opportunity to share the work Leigh, David, myself and all our producers have created on the London stage.”
Cale, who grew up in the UK, often performs in his own solo plays in the US. Harry Clarke marks his British theatrical debut as a playwright. The 80-minute monologue begins previews at the Ambassadors theatre on 9 March and runs until 11 May. Meanwhile, fans of TV’s Succession will be able to see Sarah Snook play all 26 characters in a version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray at Theatre Royal Haymarket.
