High-profile screen actors have suddenly been popping up in unlikely places. There’s a reason: the long-running, only recently resolved strikes by Hollywood’s actors’ and writers’ unions. With nothing being made, screen performers have been unable to work. As the months ground on, they understandably began asking themselves what they could do with time on their hands and no income. Why not go back to theatre?
That’s why Freddie Fox is spending Christmas in a smart update of Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to Conquer at Richmond’s 180-seat Orange Tree Theatre. And it’s why Andrew Scott – a first-rate stage actor who shot to fame as Moriarty in the BBC’s Sherlock and the “hot priest” in Fleabag – did five weeks playing every character in Vanya, a revamp of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, at the Duke of York’s theatre in the West End. And now comes Dominic West playing longshoreman Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge in the 126-seat Ustinov Studio in Bath’s Theatre Royal.
