Hot on the heels of the news that Ralph Fiennes will play Macbeth in a tour of repurposed UK warehouses comes the announcement that David Tennant will also star as the Scottish king at London’s Donmar Warehouse.
It is the Scottish actor’s first Shakespearean stage role since he played Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company, on and off, from 2013 to 2016. In 2022 he was Macbeth in a two-part BBC Radio 4 broadcast. The Donmar production will be directed by Max Webster and will conclude the 30th-anniversary season for the London theatre, which was previously home to a banana-ripening warehouse.
Tennant played Romeo for the RSC in 2000 and has also starred in Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing in the West End, among other Shakespeare productions. His last London theatre role was in Good, as a professor drawn into nazism, and brought him an Olivier award nomination. Macbeth will have a sound design by Gareth Fry and movement direction from Shelley Maxwell; further casting and creatives will be announced later. It opens for previews on 8 December and runs until 10 February.
Macbeth will be preceded at the Donmar by the European premiere of Lynn Nottage’s play Clyde’s, directed by Lynette Linton, who also had a hit with her Donmar staging of Nottage’s play Sweat. Michael Longhurst, the theatre’s outgoing artistic director (whose successor is yet to be named), called Clyde’s “hilarious and uplifting”. A survey by an American drama magazine found Clyde’s, which is set in the kitchen of a truck stop in Pennsylvania, was the most-produced play in the US in the 2022 theatre season. Nottage’s play The Secret Life of Bees is currently at the Almeida in London.
Clyde’s runs from 13 October to 2 December with set design by Frankie Bradshaw, lighting by Oliver Fenwick and sound by George Dennis. The movement director is Kane Husbands and the composer is Duramaney Kamara. Casting is yet to be announced.
