Atkins To Perform Shakespeare in New Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Eileen Atkins will offer the first performance of Shakespeare in the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 12 January, when she takes to the candlelit stage to explore and perform some of Shakespeare's greatest female characters, as told by Ellen Terry.

Considered one of the finest Shakespearean actresses of the Victorian period, Ellen Terry composed Four Lectures on Shakespeare with her friend and colleague Sir Henry Irving in the early years of the twentieth century. Eileen Atkins weaves together these lectures, stories from Ellen's life and excerpts from several of Shakespeare's plays in a dazzling and lucid dramatization of the question Ellen asks in her Four Lectures: "Have you ever thought much we all...owe to Shakespeare for his vindication of woman in his fearless, high-spirited, resolute and intelligent heroines?"

Over the course of the show Eileen performs a dozen parts - from Viola to Volumnia, from Lady Macbeth to Desdemona - to shed fascinating new light on female characters who have sometimes been construed as dull, submissive or one-dimensional.

Eileen Atkins' extensive credits for film and television include Cranford, for which she won both a BAFTA and an Emmy, Upstairs, Downstairs and Gosford Park. Her most recent stage appearance was as Mrs Rooney in a critically-acclaimed production of Beckett's All That Fall with Michael Gambon at the Jermyn Street Theatre, and subsequently in the West End.

Ellen Terry with Eileen Atkins was first performed at the Chichester Festival Theatre in August 2012.

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