Breakfast at Tiffany's

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Breakfast at Tiffany's at the Theatre Royal Haymarket Theatre in London previewed 9 September 2009, opened 29 September 2009, closed 9 January 2010.

A major stage production of Breakfast at Tiffany's in London starring Anna Friel and Joseph Cross.

New York City, 1943. William 'Fred' Parsons, a young writer from Louisiana, meets Miss Holly Golightly, a charming, vivacious and utterly elusive good-time girl. Everyone falls in love with Holly, including William - but he is poor, and Holly needs rich. Will she marry Rusty, playboy millionaire? Or Jose, the future president of Brazil? As war rages in Europe, Holly begins to fall in love with William - and then her past catches up with her...

"Anna Friel - the sexiest performance I have seen on stage since Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room" The Daily Telegraph

This stage production of Breakfast at Tiffany's in London features Anna Friel as Holly Golightly and Joseph Cross as 'William 'Fred' Parsons' along with James Dreyfus as 'O J Berman', John Ramm as 'Doc Golightly' and Suzanne Bertish as 'Madame Spanella' and Annie Hemingway, Gwendoline Christie, James Bradshaw, Sam Hoare, Paul Courtenay Hyu, Dermot Crowley, Felix D'Alviella, Nicholas Goh, Elizabeth Crarer and David Phelan. Casting subject to change.

"Anna Friel sparkles... a diamond leading lady. She acts like a natural even when being a phony and there's a hard-bitten quality to her innocence that recalls Isherwood's Sally Bowles" Time Out

This version of Truman Capote's classic novella Breakfast at Tiffany's in London has been newly adapted for the stage by Samuel Adamson and features the Oscar-winning song 'Moon River' by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. The production is directed by Sean Mathias with designs by Anthony Ward.

Joseph Cross is superb... and there's a large and almost uniformly excellent supporting cast The Daily Telegraph

"In the part of Holly Golightly, the self-invented wild child who drifts from bed to bed in New York, wearing big hats and linking up with the mafia, Anna Friel has a bolshy, Sally Bowles-like streak that makes her more convincing as a human being living on her looks and wits... Still, she's not strong enough an actress to rescue Sean Mathias's production of this spindly adaptation by Samuel Adamson. The scenes are sketchy little blurts. Anthony Ward's cut-out of the New York skyline in blue and beige looks like something designed for a birthday card for a 1950s teenager." The Observer

"Against all the odds, this proves a cracking night" The Daily Telegraph

"Imagine if Michelangelo had employed not a chisel to construct David but a Black & Decker chainsaw, and you get an idea of what a Horlicks the director Sean Mathias has made of Breakfast at Tiffany's... Mathias and Samuel Adamson, who has adapted Capote's work, have turned the anonymous narrator into an additional character: a dull, insipid fellow by the name of William, played by Joseph Cross. This is modish, concept theatre: a New York skyline against a Tiffany-turquoise backdrop is deemed enough to suggest New York in the 1940s, and a couple of flimsy staircases suffice as Miss Golightly's brownstone apartment block. All of this does Miss Friel no favours at all, but she acquits herself with considerable grace under pressure." The Sunday Telegraph

"Anna Friel - gorgeously gamine and wrapped, like a treat from Tiffany's, in an array of extravagent cocktail dresses, she's a bewitching presence, at once perilously provacative and child-like" The Independent

"Anna Friel is pretty much the best thing in Sean Mathias's simultaneously lightweight and heavy-handed production. A tiny slip of a thing, she has the right gamine quality... She's a fabulous clothes horse and she's best when she goes to pieces, for a moment as fragile as she looks. But she has neither the charisma nor chutzpah to bewitch and beguile like Audrey Hepburn. The play's the clunker. Samuel Adamson has gone back to Truman Capote's sparkling, subtle novella from 1958 and fashioned a series of lacklustre, often leaden, scenes peopled for the most part by coarse and lumpy caricatures." The Mail on Sunday

Please note that this production contains some strong language and scenes of nudity.

Breakfast at Tiffany's in London at the Theatre Royal Haymarket Theatre previews from 9 September 2009, opens on 29 September 2009 and closes on 9 January 2010.