Cast Announced For European Premiere Of Bathsheba Doran's PARENTS' EVENING

Casting has been announced for Bathsheba Doran's Parents' Evening, which receives its European premiere in a new production directed by Stella Powell Jones at Jermyn Street Theatre this October. Peter Hamilton Dyer (Mrs Orwell - Proud Haddock Southwark Playhouse, Twelfth Night - Shakespeare's Globe/Broadway, Midsummer Night's Dream - RSC) and Amy Marston (Broken Glass - Offie Nominated Best Actress - Watford Palace Theatre, A Small Family Business - National Theatre, Don John - Kneehigh) join forces in this searing and highly acclaimed two- hander.

"Would you please remember that it's not us they're assessing."

She's been disruptive in class. She's rude to the teachers. And now she wants to learn the trumpet. But whose performance is really being judged? A mother and father prepare to discuss their daughter's progress at the local primary school, but their rare opportunity for some quality time together begins to test the bonds of love, work and family.

When it premiered in 2010 at The Flea Theater, Off-Broadway, Parents' Evening was greeted with rave reviews, prompting TheatreMania to describe it as, "A compelling and absorbing new dramedy!". The writer's other work Kin (2011) was lauded by the New York Times as "A perfectly wonderful new play", and the same paper described her 2015 work The Mystery of Love and Sex as "A piercing portrait of contemporary social architecture.

Doran has transposed Parents' Evening into a UK setting for this, its European premiere. The Jermyn Street Theatre production marks the homecoming of a major British talent already acclaimed in America.

London-bred Bathsheba Doran's plays include The Mystery of Love and Sex and Kin. She is a 2009 recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award and a Susan Smith Blackburn Award finalist. She moved to the United States from the UK on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2000, received her M.F.A from Columbia University, and went on to become a playwriting fellow of The Juilliard School. Bathsheba will run the new HBO series Demimonde written by JJ Abrams. Most recently, she wrote and created espionage series Jerusalem for Channel 4 (on air next year) and was a co-Executive Producer on Hulu's upcoming series The Looming Tower. Before that, she was a co-Executive Producer on Steve McQueen's HBO project, Codes of Conduct. Previously, she was a co-Producer on Masters of Sex for Showtime, and a staff writer on Boardwalk Empire, where her episode received a WGA nomination. This is her European premiere.

Stella Powell Jones is Deputy Director of Jermyn Street Theatre. Her directing credits at the theatre include: Tomorrow at Noon and Boo Killebrew's The Play About My Dad. Before joining Jermyn Street Theatre, Stella was based in the U.S. where her directing credits include Doran's The Mystery of Love and Sex (Signature Theatre), Samuel D. Hunter's The Healing and Nick Jones' Trevor (Circle X) which was nominated for Best Director and Best Production at the Ovation Awards.

Artistic Director of Jermyn Street Theatre, Tom Littler says, "Bathsheba Doran is one of the most exciting voices in American playwriting and screenwriting at the moment, lauded for her distinctive voice, emotional honesty and sharp wit. But in fact she's a Londoner born and bred, and moved to New York some time ago. We are thrilled to be the first UK theatre to present the work of this major British playwright. Parents' Evening is a painfully funny and wonderfully intimate play."

Jermyn Street Theatre is an art-house theatre in the heart of London's West End. The 70-seat studio opened in 1994, and has since won numerous awards and transferred many productions to the West End and Broadway. In summer 2017 Tom Littler became Artistic Director. Littler relaunched the venue as a producing house. Jermyn Street Theatre is a signatory to the Equity Fringe Agreement.

During the theatre's first year as a producing venue, it has staged world premieres of five full-length plays (including Howard Brenton's The Blinding Light), five one-act plays, two European premieres, and several revivals including the complete cycle of Noel Coward's Tonight at 8.30. Jermyn Street Theatre has also reported that its weekly sales are up by over 50%, and it has employed 28 female and 26 male actors.

Parents' Evening is the second play in Jermyn Street Theatre's REBELS SEASON, which also includes the current production About Leo (to September 29), Billy Bishop Goes To War by John Gray with Eric Peterson (October 31 to November 24) and Burke and Hare by Tom Wentworth (November 28 to December 21).