Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz are in closely guarded negotiations to heat up Broadway in a play about a wife cuckolding her husband.
The talks centre on the couple appearing together this autumn in Betrayal, Harold Pinter’s 1978 cool dissection of deceit.
Daniel, aka 007, would play publisher Robert, whose wife Emma (who runs an art gallery) is having an affair with his friend, Jerry, a literary agent.
Pinter uses the structure of reverse chronology, and no matter how many times I’ve seen it, I’m still somewhat shocked by the stinging cruelty of the layers of deception.
The production is dependent on several parts of a complex jigsaw fitting together. One major piece involves celebrated director Mike Nichols and whether he’ll sign on to the production.
Nichols, who directed classic movies such as The Graduate, scored a triumph last season in New York with a spellbinding revival of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Spiderman actor Andrew Garfield.
Another part of the puzzle concerns the identity of the actor who’ll play Jerry, Rachel’s stage lover. No one has been cast in that part yet.
It will be a huge project if it can be fully signed up.
Rachel and Daniel already get mobbed like rock stars in Manhattan. And this would mark Rachel’s Broadway debut, which would allow her to show New Yorkers what we in the West End already know: that she is a first-class theatre talent, as her luminous study of Blanche DuBois at the Donmar in Rob Ashford’s 2009 hothouse production of A Streetcar Named Desire proved.
Rachel had been considering leading David Hare’s Plenty into the Public Theater in New York before Betrayal came along.
And Craig? Well, he’s beyond red-hot, thanks to the phenomenal success of Sam Mendes’s Skyfall.
The DVD and blu-ray versions of the film will go on sale on February 18, and advance orders on Amazon are stratospheric.
The movie has taken a staggering $1.1 billion globally — more than ten per cent of that in the UK.
Added to this, Skyfall collected two best film trophies at the Evening Standard British Film Awards on Monday.
Beyond red-hot: Daniel Craig starred as James Bond in the hugely successful Skyfall directed by Sam Mendes
Beyond red-hot: Daniel Craig starred as James Bond in the hugely successful Skyfall directed by Sam Mendes
Craig was last on stage back in 2009 when he and Hugh Jackman did A Steady Rain in Manhattan to houses packed to the rafters.
If it all comes together, it would be for a limited run because Craig has to begin pre-production on Bond 24 next year.
Mendes is considering directing that after he completes working with Simon Russell Beale (go see him in Privates On Parade at the Noel Coward Theatre in the West End!) in King Lear, opening early in 2014 at the National Theatre.
Meanwhile, Sam’s hard at it preparing Charlie And The Chocolate Factory at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.
Craig is expected to attend the Oscars on February 24, when the Academy will salute 50 years of James Bond.
BOND 24 "erst" 2015!?
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