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You’ll know Susan Sarandon for her hugely impressive, decades-spanning screen career and her sideline of making controversial third-party endorsements in US elections. The veteran US actor’s stage roles have been much more sporadic: after her film career took off she more or less gave up treading the boards until relatively recent times, her only roles this millennium being a Broadway Ionesco revival in 2009 and a Jesse Eisenberg play (!) in 2019.
She’s never performed on the London stage, either. But she will finally do so this autumn, starring in outgoing Old Vic boss Matthew Warchus’s premiere production of Tracy Letts’s drama Mary Page Marlowe. It will run at the Vic from late September to early November – Sarandon will turn 79 during the stint.
And she’ll be joined by a star of our own. Brit actress Andrea Riseborough is half Sarandon’s age but has similarly traded the stage – where she was a regular in her twenties – for a busy and eclectic screen career that’s taken in everything from Tom Cruise sci-fi Oblivion to her unexpectedly Oscar nomination garnering turned in the low budget indie flick To Leslie.
The two will joined forces to play the same woman at different ages in Lett’s drama, which is a vivid but jumbled portrait of the title character’s life that jumps around wildly over 70 years, slowly building up a picture. It’s played to acclaim in Chicago – and now it’s headed over here.
This is officially the first play in Warchus’s final season running the Old Vic, which is expected to stretch on until summer 2026 before his successor Rupert Goold takes over next autumn. It’s been announced that the Vic will be reconfigured into a more intimate in-the-round set up for the whole final season – there’s no word of what the rest of the programming will be, but it does suggest that small dramas with big names might be how Warchus sees out his time – which we’re definitely not complaining about.
Mary Page Marlowe is at the Old Vic Sep 23-Nov 1. Tickets go on sale at noon on July 4.