Full Cast Announced For the UK Première of MARJORIE PRIME

As public booking opens, the Menier Chocolate Factory has announced the full casting for the UK première of Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime. Dominic Dromgoole directs Nancy Carroll (Olivier Award and Evening Standard Award for Best Actress for After the Dance - National Theatre), Richard Fleeshman (Company - Olivier Award nomination), Tony Jayawardena (The Father and The Assassin, England People Very Nice, East is East - National Theatre), and Anne Reid (Last Tango in Halifax and The Mother - BAFTA nomination and winner of the Critics' Circle Film Award).

The production opens on 15 March, with previews from 3 March and runs until 6 May.

In this richly spare, wondrous play, Jordan Harrison explores the mysteries of human identity and the limits - if any - of what technology can replace.

It's the age of artificial intelligence, and 85-year-old Marjorie - a jumble of disparate, fading memories - has a handsome new companion who's programmed to feed the story of her life back to her. What would we remember, and what would we forget, if given the chance?

Jordan Harrison was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Marjorie Prime. The play premièred at the Mark Taper Forum/Center Theater Group in Los Angeles in September 2014 and had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons.

Nancy Carroll plays Tess. For theatre, her credits include Manor, The Magistrate, After the Dance - Oliver Award and Evening Standard Award for Best Actress, Man of Mode (National Theatre), Betrayal (Theatre Royal Bath), The Deep Blue Sea (Chichester Festival Theatre), The Moderate Soprano (Hampstead Theatre, Duke of York's Theatre), Young Marx (Bridge Theatre), Woyzeck (The Old Vic), Closer, The Recruiting Officer (Donmar Warehouse), House of Games, King Lear (Almeida Theatre), A Midsummer Night's Dream (Sheffield Theatres), Arcadia (Duke of York's Theatre), Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 (RSC) and Mammals (Bush Theatre). For television, her work includes Father Brown, Murder in Provence, Stephen, The Crown, Agatha Raisin, Queens of Mystery, Will, Prime Suspect 1973, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, and Call the Midwife; and for film, The Gathering Storm, Iris and An Ideal Husband.

Richard Fleeshman plays Walter. His theatre work includes Company - Olivier Award nomination (Gielgud Theatre), The Last Ship (UK tour), Guys and Dolls (Phoenix Theatre), A Damsel in Distress (Chichester Festival Theatre), Urinetown (St James Theatre), Ghost - The Musical (Piccadilly Theatre and Broadway), Legally Blonde The Musical (Savoy Theatre). For television, his work includes The Ark, Deep Heat, Chivalry, The Sandman, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Reign, Call the Midwife, Moving On, All the Small Things, Monday Monday, Blue Murder and Coronation Street - as series regular Craig Harris; and for film, RIPD: Rise of the Damned, A Christmas Number One, The Gallery, Deadly Admirer and An Angel for May.

Tony Jayawardena plays Jon. His theatre credits include The Fir Tree, Christmas at the Snow Globe, Lions and Tigers, Twelfth Night (Shakespeare's Globe), Antigone (Regent's Park Open Air Theatre), The Father and The Assassin, England People Very Nice (National Theatre), East is East (Birmingham Rep and National Theatre), White Teeth, The Invisible Hand (Kiln Theatre), Hobson's Choice (Royal Exchange Theatre), Young Marx (Bridge Theatre), Bend It Like Beckham (Phoenix Theatre), The Roaring Girl, The Arden of Faversham, The White Devil, The Empress, Twelfth Night (RSC), Dick Whittington, Love and Stuff (Theatre Royal Stratford East), The Wind In The Willows (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Wah! Wah! Girls (Sadler's Wells/ Kneehigh), Great Expectations (English Touring Theatre), The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (Royal and Derngate, Northampton), London Assurance, All's Well That Ends Well, England People Very Nice (National Theatre). For television his recent work includes Avoidance, The Duchess, The Crown, Ackley Bridge, The Tunnel, The Windsors, Strike Back, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby; and for film, his work includes The Cook, Jadoo, Trance, The Wedding Video, Towerblock, A Cat Named Bob and A Bunch of Amateurs.

Veteran of the stage and screen, Anne Reid plays Marjorie. For theatre, her credits include A Woman of No Importance (Vaudeville Theatre), Fracked!, Out of this World (Chichester Festival Theatre), Hedda Gabler (The Old Vic), Dimetos (Donmar Warehouse), Happy Now?, Wild Oats (National Theatre), Into the Woods (Royal Opera House), The Epitaph of George Dillon (Comedy Theatre), The York Realist (Royal Court) and A Family Affair (Theatre Royal Bath). For television her extensive credits include The Sixth Commandment, Sanditon, Years & Years, Hold the Sunset, Last Tango in Halifax, Our Zoo, The Last Witch, Upstairs Downstairs, Marchlands, Moving On, Five Days, Ladies of Letters, In Love with Barbara, Shameless, Affinity, The Bad Mother's Handbook, Doctor Who, Jane Eyre, Bleak House, Life Begins, Dinnerladies, Sweet Charity and Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV; and for film, SAS Red Notice, Aeronauts, The Nest, The Snowman, Romans, Kaleidoscope, Believe, Foster, Cemetery Junction, Faintheart, Savage Grace, Hot Fuzz, Little Trip to Heaven, and The Mother (Critics' Circle Award for British Actress of the Year).

Jordan Harrison's plays include Maple and Vine premièred in the 2011 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville and went on to productions at American Conservatory Theatre and Playwrights Horizons, among others. Harrison's other plays include The Grown-Up (2014 Humana Festival), Doris to Darlene (Playwrights Horizons), Amazons and their Men (Clubbed Thumb), Act A Lady (2006 Humana Festival), Finn in the Underworld (Berkeley Repertory Theatre), Futura (Portland Center Stage, NAATCO), Kid-Simple (2004 Humana Festival), Standing on Ceremony (Minetta Lane), The Museum Play (Washington Ensemble Theatre), and a musical, Suprema (O'Neill Music Theatre Conference). Harrison is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, the Kesselring Prize, the Roe Green Award from Cleveland Play House, the Heideman Award, a Theater Masters Innovative Playwright Award, the Loewe Award for Musical Theater, Jerome and McKnight Fellowships, a NYSCA grant, and a NEA/TCG Residency with The Empty Space Theater. His children's musical, The Flea and the Professor, won the Barrymore Award for Best Production after premièring at the Arden Theatre. A graduate of Stanford University and the Brown MFA program, Harrison is an alumnus of New Dramatists. He is an Affiliated Artist with Clubbed Thumb, The Civilians, and The Playwrights' Center. Harrison wrote for the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black.

Dominic Dromgoole directs. He launched a new theatre company, Classic Spring, which produced a year-long celebration of Oscar Wilde in 2017/18 directing the first play in the season, A Woman of No Importance, at the Vaudeville Theatre. Dromgoole was Artistic Director of Shakespeare's Globe from 2006 to 2016. In that time the Globe grew into an international theatre of progressive ambition and radical scope. Amongst other projects, he created a UK-wide touring operation and grew this touring internationally, culminating in a two-year tour of Hamlet which travelled to every country in the world. In 2012, he directed the Globe to Globe Festival, which hosted companies from 37 different countries. He was previously Artistic Director of the Bush Theatre - during his tenure between 1990-1996 he nurtured upcoming talents by premiering 65 new plays from a host of now influential writers such as Billy Roche, Irvine Welsh and Naomi Wallace. He then moved onto the Oxford Stage Company which he ran from 1999 to 2005. He launched a new film company, Open Palm Films, and made his first feature, Making Noise Quietly, in the summer of 2016. The film, released by an adaptation of Robert Holman's play of the same name, starred Deborah Findlay, Barbara Marten, Trystan Gravelle and Matthew Tennyson, and was released by Verve in 2019. He is the author of the recently published Astonish Me! First Nights That Changed the World as well as Hamlet: Globe to Globe, The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting and Will and Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life, which won the inaugural Sheridan Morley award.

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