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Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki, best known for playing Diana, Princess of Wales in The Crown, is to return to London theatre this summer.
Debicki, whose last London role was in the thriller The Red Barn at the National Theatre in 2016, will star in American playwright Lila Raicek’s My Master Builder. It was announced last month that Ewan McGregor will play the lead role of an architect in the play. On Friday it was announced that Debicki has been cast as the architect’s former student, whose arrival disrupts a Hamptons house party thrown by his wife, who will be played by Kate Fleetwood.
The play, inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s classic The Master Builder, will be directed by Michael Grandage. Debicki said that Raicek’s script “caught my attention immediately with its blazing exploration of the pain and great beauty that is endured and experienced should we take the risk in life to love someone”.
Debicki studied drama at the University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts and graduated in 2010. Soon afterwards she was cast in Baz Luhrmann’s film of The Great Gatsby. In 2013 she starred with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert in Sydney Theatre Company’s production of The Maids by Jean Genet.
Raicek’s other work includes the plays Fire Season, inspired by Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and Tulla, about the artist Edvard Munch. Her debut novel, The Plunge, is to be published this year. Fleetwood, whose recent productions include A View from the Bridge and 101 Dalmatians, called My Master Builder “a bold and arresting retelling” of Ibsen. “It’s a play about memories, the way we lodge them and narrate them, for better or for worse,” said Fleetwood.
The play will run at Wyndham’s theatre, which is currently home to the sold-out production Inside No 9: Stage/Fright. My Master Builder begins previews on 17 April and will close on 12 July. David Ajala and Mirren Mack complete the cast.
