Oscar winner Susan Sarandon said she’s “terrified but excited” to be making her UK stage debut this fall at London’s The Old Vic Theatre starring with Academy Award nominee Andrea Riseborough in the U.K. premiere of Tracy Letts’ play Mary Page Marlowe which spans 70 years in a woman’s life.
Sarandon (Dead Man Walking, Feud) and Riseborough (To Leslie, Birdman) will play the title character at different stages of her story.
The production will be directed by The Old Vic’s artistic director Matthew Warchus (Groundhog Day, Pride) in his final season before stopping down in September 2026.
Sarandon has appeared both on and off Broadway several times beginning with An Evening with Richard Nixon and … that ran 16 performances at the Shubert Theatre in 1972. She last trod the boards in NYC in Jesse Eisenberg’s Happy Talk at the Pershing Square Signature center in 2019.
I saw her in Eisenberg’s play. Prior to that I caught her and Geoffrey Rush in an adaptation of Eugene Ionesca’s Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore in 2009.
In a comment released via The Old Vic, Sarandon said: ”I’m so honored to be asked to be in a play during Matthew Warchus’ final season at The Old Vic. Terrified but excited.”
Warchus has lured Sarandon over while also managing to entice Riseborough back to her theater roots here in Blighty for the first time since she starred with Kenneth Branagh and Tom Hiddleston in Ivanov in a 2008 production directed by Michael Grandage for the Donmar Warehouse Theatre’s West End season at Wyndham’s Theatre.
However, New Yorkers welcomed her more recently, relatively speaking, in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride with Hugh Dancy, Adam James and Ben Whishaw directed by Joe Mantello. That was 15 years ago at MCC Theater. Saw that too.
Mary Page Marlowe reunites Riseborough and Warchus, who directed her in the movie Matilda: The Musical three years ago.
Last year Warchus announced that he will depart The Old Vic, where he has been in artistic control since 2014. Rupert Goold, the Almeida Theatre’s artistic director and also a filmmaker (Judy), will replace him.
Performances for Mary Page Marlowe begin at the Old Vic from September 23 and through November 1 and will be performed in-the-round, “perhaps my favorite configuration,” Warchus said.
Some seats for the first five previews will be marked at the bargain price of $13.71 (£10).
The original production premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 2016, transferring to off Broadway in 2018.
The play’s about choices, both mundane and gripping, and where those choices have taken the title character over her lifetime with children and three husbands. Other members of the large cast are still being assembled.
Warchus hailed Pulitzer Prize winner Letts (August: Osage County) as “one of America’s greatest living writers.”
