The Letter

This show has now closed, click here for a listing of current and future London shows

Opened 1 May 2007, closed 11 August 2007 at the Wyndham's Theatre in London

A major revival of Somerset Maugham's 1927 dark and steamy psychological thriller The Letter in London starring Jenny Seagrove and Anthony Andrews and directed by Alan Strachan.

When the wife of a Malaysian rubber planter is witnessed murdering a local playboy, she claims it was self-defence. Convinced of her innocence, her husband hires a family friend to defend her. However, a mysterious letter subsequently comes to light, casting doubt on her integrity and threatening to cost her everything.

Cast features Jenny Seagrove as 'Leslie Crosbie', Andrew Charleson as 'Robert Crosbie' and Anthony Andrews as 'Howard Joyce' with Jason Chan as 'Ong Chi Seng', Peter Sandys-Clarke 'John Withers', Jamie Zubairi 'Head Boy', Andrew Joshi 'Hassan', Sioned Jones 'Mrs Parker', Jon David Yu 'Chung Hi', Liz Sutherland 'Chinese Woman', Karen Ascoe 'Dorothy Joyce' and Chris McCalphy 'Geoffrey Hammond'. The play is directed by Alan Strachan with designs by Paul Farnsworth, lighting by Jason Taylor, sound by Ian Horrocks-Taylor and music composed by Catherine Jayes.

Jenny Seagrove is best known for her role as 'Jo Mills' in the BBC's hit television serial drama, Judge John Deed. Jenny Seagrove has numerous London West End stage credits, her most recent being playing alongside Hollywood star Woody Harrelson in Tennessee Williams' play The Night of the Iguana.

Anthony Andrews came to the public's attention through his role as 'Sebastion Flyte' in the classic television drama Brideshead Revisted. His recent London West End stage credits include starring in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman In White and the National Theatre's revival of My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

W Somerset Maugham's theatrical career began in 1902 with A Man of Honour and continued until Sheppey in 1935, his many successes over three decades including The Circle, Home and Beauty, Our Betters and For Services Rendered. His short story Rain was dramatised in 1922 by John Colton and Clemence Randolph; a sensational success on Broadway, with Jeanne Eagels giving a legendary performance as 'Sadie Thompson', Rain was produced in London in 1925. Maugham chose to dramatise The Letter himself and it proved a successful milestone in the career of one of his favourite actors, Gladys Cooper, who produced the play in 1927 as her first venture into management at the Playhouse Theatre. Gladys Cooper also starred as 'Leslie Crosbie', directed by Gerald du Maurier. The cast also included Nigel Bruce as 'Robert Crosbie' and Leslie Faber as 'Howard Joyce'. Later that year Katharine Cornell headed the Broadway production. The Letter was revived in 1995 at the Lyric, Hammersmith, with Janna Lumley and Tim Pigott-Smnith heading a cast directed by Neil Bartlett. The Letter has twice been filmed; Jeanne Eagels was nominated for an Oscar for her starring role in the 1929 version while Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall and James Stephenson led the cast of William Wyler's 1940 movie which received seven Oscar nominations including 'Best Picture' and 'Best Actress' for Bette Davis. A highly regarded television production was produced in 1956 which featured Celia johnson as a much-praised 'Leslie Crosbie'and Roland Culver as 'Howard Joyce'.

The director Alan Strachan said: "The reputation of W Somerset Maugham - once the Grand Old Man of British Letters, internationally famous and successful as novelist, dramatist, short-story writer and essayist - took more than the usual posthumous dip, from which only now, half a century since his death in 1965, it is now recovering. Much of his varied output is once again in print and there have been recent successful LOndon reappraisals of plays including the comedies Home and Beauty [London Lyric Theatre October 2002] and The Constant Wife [London Apollo Theatre Shaftesbury Avenue April 2002]... His very best work is contained in two groups of short stories - the 'Ashenden' sequence of espionage tales written out of his Secret Service work, and those set in Malaysia or the South Seas... The inspiration for The Letter, which first appeared in perhaps his finest collection of stories, The Casuarina Tree (1924), was the extraordinary real-life case of Ethel Proudlock, wife of the principal of a noted Kuala Lumpur school, who was sentenced to death for shooting a tin-mine manager six times, although the European community organised, with remarkable efficiency, a petition which ultimately secured a free pardon."