Mark Evans’ Bleak Expectations set to make West End debut – Stephen Fry, Jo Brand, Jack Dee, Lee Mack to star
Mark Evans’ highly-acclaimed play, Bleak Expectations, is set to make its West End debut this spring with Caroline Leslie attached as director.
The play is set to open at the Criterion Theatre, with previews beginning on May 3, the play opening on May 18 and then running until September 3.
Described as a Dickens mash up, Bleak Expectations is transferring directly from The Watermill Theatre, where it ran from late May to early July last year. At the time one reviewer called it “Dickens with a dash of Monty Python”.
The play is an adaptation of the award-winning BBC 4 radio comedy of the same name, which ran from 2007 to 2012. It follows the adventures of three siblings Pip, Poppy and Pippa and their friend Harry Biscuit as they try to outsmart the Hardthrasher family and outrun Mr Gently Benevolent in Victorian London.
As if that wasn’t fun enough, each week a star is set to take over the role of narrator, Sir Philip (“Pip”) Bin, and so far the guests in the line-up include actors Stephen Fry, Stephen Mangan, Ben Miller and Adjoa Andoh and comedians Tom Allen, Alexander Armstrong, Jo Brand, Jack Dee, Nish Kumar, Lee Mack and Sue Perkins.
Stephen Fry said: “I’m so excited about this coming gig that I simply can’t keep any solid food down. Sounds a bit grim, but I only throw up for really prestige projects.”
Nish Kumar said: “ I am as excited to do whatever this is as any human being has ever been about doing anything in the entire human species.”
Jo Brand said: “Bleak Expectations is the motto by which I have always lived my life, so delighted I can continue to live the dream.”
Ben Miller said: “Few things, I contend, may afford an actor such pleasure as joining the cast of Bleak Expectations for a glorious week of their knicker-wettingly funny Criterion run.”
Evans previously worked on That Mitchell and Webb Sound (the Mitchell and Webb radio show) and its TV adaptation That Mitchell and Webb Look. Leslie’s past credits include Ian Hislop and Nick Newman’s West End play The Wipers Times, and the recent pantomime Sleeping Beauty, for which she has been nominated for an Offie Award.
Tickets are available to buy now here, from £15, with as many as 16,000 tickets reportedly available at £30 or under over the course of the show’s run.
Bleak Expectations, from May 3 to September 3, W1J 9HR; bleakexpectations.com
