BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Everybody’s talking about Jamie… again!

Acclaimed musical Everybody’s Talking About Jamie will return to the West End next month with a full cast and orchestra — and Covid-19 secure in all areas — but the show’s producer is begging people not to come if they’re feeling unwell.

The creative team of director Jonathan Butterell, plus Dan Gillespie Sells and Tom MacRae — who wrote the music and lyrics — have updated and adapted the show to reflect ‘a new Covid world’, producer Nica Burns told me.

Burns, co-proprietor of Nimax Theatres, which owns the Apollo, Shaftesbury Avenue where Jamie will reopen on November 28, said that these days ‘schoolkids wear masks in corridors, and in some scenes so will ours’.

Socially distanced seating means capacity has been cut by 50 per cent, to 325 seats; so breaking even will be tough, especially as this is a big show with a company of 35 actors and musicians on stage, not to mention 30-plus backstage.

Burns said she has been able to bring Jamie back with the help of a Cultural Recovery Fund grant of £249,548 — without which ‘it would not have been possible to open until social distancing ended’.

Health-and-safety measures will be rigorous, she added. For instance, actors, and everyone backstage (who, by the way, will not be allowed to mingle with those who work front of house) will be tested every 48 hours.

Seats in the stalls have been reconfigured, to ensure one metre spacing is possible; masks will be compulsory; and all manner of other safety protocols will be in place.

Ticketholders will be sent a health questionnaire 48 hours before their show date. 

‘If you tick that you’re unhealthy, then you won’t get your tickets,’ Burns warned. They will be exchanged, or customers will be guaranteed a refund. 

‘If it’s your birthday, or someone else’s birthday, and you’re unwell, do not come!’ she stressed. 

‘People have to start taking responsibility for not going out when they’re sick.’

The cast will be led by Noah Thomas as Jamie and Melissa Jacques as his mum. Phil Nichol will play Loco Chanelle, taking over from Rufus Hound, who has committed to Dancing On Ice. 

Burns said that when the cast were told the show would go on, ‘it was a very joyous moment, in what’s been a very dark time’. Re-rehearsals are imminent.

Burns said if London were to move up to the highest risk Tier 3 category, ‘we’ll pause the show and then pick it up again’. 

The season will run for six months and extend, as demand warrants. The box office will likely get a big bounce in February, when the Jamie film, starring Max Harwood and Richard E. Grant, is scheduled for release.

Robert Harris’s best-selling thriller Conclave is heading for the cinema screen. Edward Berger, who made the Patrick Melrose mini-series with Benedict Cumberbatch, is set to direct the story about machinations inside Vatican City when the reformist pope dies and the College of Cardinals meet to choose his successor. Casting has started for a line-up of top-tier actors to play the (mostly) ruthless cardinals.

Vanya is ready for his close-up

Toby Jones, Rosalind Eleazar, Richard Armitage, Roger Allam and the rest of the cast of Ian Rickson’s poignant film of his production of Uncle Vanya have been haunting my dreams … in the best way.

I can’t work out whether it’s because I saw the play at the Harold Pinter Theatre not long before lockdown, and it stayed with me through weeks of isolation. Or whether it’s because Rickson’s film is that rare staged drama that’s somehow managed to retain its intimacy on screen. Probably both.

Whatever, Uncle Vanya — based on Conor McPherson’s version of Chekhov’s classic — is an outstanding film, charged with emotion.

That’s partly due to the actors’ performances.But also down to the decision (a stroke of genius) by Rickson and producer Sonia Friedman to bookend the story with the cast arriving back at the deserted theatre, months after having left it; and then embracing each other on stage after their work is done.

Aimee Lou Wood, Anna Calder-Marshall, Dearbhla Molloy and Peter Wight are joined by Allam as Professor Serebryakov — replacing Ciaran Hinds, who played the role back in the spring. Hinds has been busy elsewhere, portraying Kenneth Branagh’s grandfather (alongside Judi Dench, as his grandmother, as this column revealed) in the autobiographical film Belfast, which Branagh has been directing. Caitriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan play the parents.

Uncle Vanya is released on Tuesday. For participating cinemas, visit unclevanya cinema.com

Sope in a house of horrors

Sope Dirisu noted that Ian McKellen’s definition of a successful thespian is ‘someone who has a job to go on to’. And by that mark, the actor’s doing pretty well.

Dirisu is shooting a new film; and he has projects waiting, in a holding pattern, for next year. Also in 2021, he’ll be seen in Silent Night, alongside Keira Knightley.

During the lockdown, Dirisu’s profile rose thanks to his role as a kickass undercover cop in Sky Atlantic’s terrific mini-series Gangs Of London.

And next Friday, he and Wunmi Mosaku (star of HBO’s Lovecraft Country) will appear in director Remi Weekes’s psychological horror movie His House, which starts on Netflix just in time for Halloween.

They play a couple from South Sudan, seeking asylum in the U.K., who are sent to a decrepit sink estate where they discover that something — or someone — is living in the walls of their home.

The best horror thrillers, Dirisu said, have a story that underpins the terror. In This House, it’s as if the awful civil war the couple escaped, and the perilous journey they endured to reach England, have followed them. 

‘The trauma’s still within them,’ Dirisu told me. ‘You can’t shake off too quickly the reason they left their country.’

Dirisu observed that the fear depicted in the movie emerges out of their culture. 

‘Despite the missionaries’ and the colonisers’ best efforts, there’s a different culture of spirituality that exists in Africa, and I think we touch on that in this film, with the ‘thing’ they discover in the house,’ he said of the BBC Films production.

Was he scared making it? ‘With horror, there’s a lot of technicality to it,’ he explained. 

‘Lots of set-ups and set pieces. There’s a science to making those scares work.’ So nope, he wasn’t frightened — because he was involved in helping to create the fear factor. 

‘But I hope those coming to it fresh are truly terrified,’ he said ominously.

In addition to scaring the living daylights out of them, the film might also give audiences pause to consider the plight of refugees. Dirisu said he was glad to be able to give a voice to people who are talked about ‘cursorily in the news, but we never hear their stories from their own mouths’.

He and Mosaku ensure those voices are heard loud and clear.

More recently, Dirisu has been working with Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, Josh O’Connor and Odessa Young in filmmaker Eva Husson’s Mothering Sunday, based on Graham Swift’s novel of the same name. Producers Elizabeth Karlsen and Stephen Woolley signed the London-based actor up after watching his work during quarantine.

‘I’m lucky to be able to say that I have something to look forward to,’ he said, echoing McKellen’s words.

And next year he hopes to be in front of the cameras again, for season two of Gangs Of London. Which will be good news for the show’s legion of devoted fans…including many women. 

‘There was a concern that it was going to be too violent for some people, and the target audience was very masculine,’ Dirisu said. But he was comforted to hear that it had attracted a wide range of fans.

‘We’re hopeful of doing the second season, but it does depend on the worldwide health situation,’ he warned.

Watch out for

Daniel Evans, the artistic chief at Chichester Festival Theatre, who has agreed to live-stream his Sunday In The Park With Daniel tribute to music theatre legend Stephen Sondheim, on November 1.

The two concert shows are sold out — but the 7pm performance will be available to watch live, in your homes, for £15. Gabrielle Brooks, Clive Rowe, Jenna Russell, Hannah Waddingham and Evans will honour the composer, who turned 90 this year, by performing his greatest hits, and then some. All the actors have a connection to Sondheim, particularly Russell and Evans, who starred in his musical Sunday In The Park With George in London, and on Broadway.

■ You can book for the livestream via cft.org.uk.