Interviewing Michael Grandage earlier this week, Mark Lawson observed that although Grandage's West End production of Madame de Sade was a rare misfire, its box-office success "proved the proposition that people would pay to see Judi Dench in anything." Possibly even reading the telephone directory, although Maureen Lipman has already tried that trick.
While celebrity casting of the Madonna or Nicole Kidman kind will always be a sure-fire draw because people want a chance to gawp at a star in the flesh, there are fewer serious actors who, like Dench, have real box-office pulling power whatever the play. David Tennant is one of that rare breed.
I've got plenty of personal favourites (including obvious suspects such as Simon Russell Beale, Adrian Lester, Penelope Wilton and Fiona Shaw) who pass my personal telephone-directory test – and, yes, Dench would be right up there with them. But I reckon that in most cases it's the combination of actor and play that makes you rush to book a ticket, or in some cases the combination of two or more particular actors in a particular play. That's probably the case with Broadway's upcoming revival of Pinter's Betrayal with real-life starry couple, Rachel Weisz and Daniel Craig, and Grandage's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which boasts the killer combination of David Walliams and Sheridan Smith as Bottom and Titania. In fact, Smith is fast becoming an actor who passes the telephone-directory test for me, along with other rising stars such as Lucy Ellinson (currently in Grounded at the Gate), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (in Fleabag at Soho) and the brilliant Cush Jumbo.
So I'd love to know which actors – either established, or still not widely known – that you'd go see under any circumstances. Who would pass your own personal telephone-directory test?
