In the NT Lyttelton, there will be a series of 6pm performances of Caryl Churchill’s Three More Sleepless Nights (ten dates only from 30 July to 27 August). The cast comprises Hattie Morahan, Lindsey Coulson, Ian Hart and Paul Ready, directed by Gareth Machin.

Caryl Churchill’s engaging play is a powerful look at human interaction and relationships. One double bed. Two couples. Three short acts of love-tangled conversation that expertly twist and turn, from existential angst to sci-fi films; from explosive arguments to long silences.

Prices: £10.00

The Conways, celebrating Kay Conway’s (Hattie Morahan) 21st birthday in 1919, seem a golden family – safe and well after the Great War, looking forward to future careers, marriages, and a brave new world. Through J B Priestley’s masterly manipulation of time, we see into their future and back again to where the seeds of their downfall were planted.

There’s a great devil in the universe, and we call it Time.

Priestley was fascinated by the study of time. Writing in 1937, he saw how Britain was complacently failing to learn from history and charging headlong towards another conflagration.

Time doesn’t destroy anything. It merely moves us on – in this life – from one peep-hole to the next.

The NT returns to Priestley for the first time since its ground-breaking production of An Inspector Calls.

Read about the play on Wikipedia | More info and tickets

The Times has a nice piece about Anna Carteret, 65, and her daughter Hattie Morahan, 30, both actresses and how they work together.

I saw how we work in very different ways. She’s instinctive, whereas I’m more analytical. And of course she keeps saying: “Oh, I don’t want to embarrass you.” And I say: “Mum; I’m not 16 any more.”

read more at The Times

The centrepiece of the Donmar Warehouse’s T S Eliot festival is a full staging of Eliot’s The Family Reunion, with a cast that includes Samuel West, Penelope Wilton, Hattie Morahan, Gemma Jones and Una Stubbs. The Family Reunion opens on 25 November and plays until 10 January.

Wouldn’t she be great.

Let’s get the campaign started!

Marple: A Pocketful of Rye

An Agatha Christie murder mystery based on the rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’.

Plot:

When wealthy Rex Fortescue dies while having tea, the police are baffled. Mr. Fortescue died during his morning tea in the office and the diagnosis was that a poison, taxine – a poison found as an alkaloid in berries of the yew tree, had killed him. His wife was the main suspect in the murder, until she also was murdered, after she as well drank the tea. Her lover, Mr. Dubois, was the suspect next, as well as just about everyone that knew the family. Going on the only clue, a pocket full of rye found on the victim, Miss Marple begins investigating. Marple realizes the murders are arranged according to the pattern of her childhood nursery rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’. Murder though, is anything but child’s play. She works together with Inspector Neele on the case, who seems to have a very different idea of what happened.

Hattie Morahan’s character: Elaine Fortescue

Imdb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1189440/

OPENING WEDNESDAY, 30 July 2008 (previews from 23 July), …some trace of her, inspired by Dostoyevsky’s 1869 Russian novel The Idiot, premieres at the National Theatre, where it joins the NT Cottesloe rep (See News, 7 Apr 2008). It’s adapted and directed by Katie Mitchell and her company, including Ben Whishaw and Hattie Morahan, with multimedia design by Leo Warner and Vicki Mortimer.

Hattie Morahan lives in north London with her partner and stars inThe City at the Royal Court from 24 April to 7 June

The house/flat I grew up in…. detached, in the middle of the Devil’s Punchbowl in Surrey, which is about as idyllic as you can get. The valley behind is like a back garden. It was a great place to go off and explore when I was young.

When I was a child I wanted to be… either a writer or an actor. I swung wildly between wanting get up in front of people and be the performer, make the crowds laugh, and shutting myself away in a room and writing stories.

The moment that changed me for ever… was seeing Steven Dillane as Hamlet when I was a teenager. Members of my English class felt he’d thrown away wonderful lines, which was highly frustrating; that was the point! And he was just so natural and effortless.

My greatest inspiration…. is both of my parents, but in very different ways. My work ethic I get from my dad, who is thorough and rigorous in all that he does. My mother’s a fantastic actress and very giving, bringing happiness to those around her.

My real-life villain … I’m not very good at out-and-out condemnation, I prefer to see things from all sides; but those who are unnecessarily rude really piss me off!

If I could change one thing about myself… I would need less sleep, I’m embarrassingly and maddeningly inept when under-slept. It would be fantastic to have extra hours in the day.

At night I dream of... anything and everything. My nightmares are either about being late or the typical actor’s dreams: onstage, in the wrong play, with nothing on and not knowing my part.

What I see when I look in the mirror… something/someone a bit chaotic and haphazard. I’ve never been particularly well-groomed, in fact I’m a bit mystified as to how people find the time.

My style icon…. is a Taiwanese friend of mine and fashion designer, Mei Hui Lui, who always looks exquisite and utterly unique. It’s fabulous when people wear clothes they love, it’s an attitude that inspires rather than the clothes.

My favourite item of clothing… continually changes. At the moment I love a chocolate-brown sparkly wide belt, which I picked up in a second-hand store in Berlin.

I wish I’d never worn… you can’t regret that kind of thing, that’s the most entertaining thing about fashion! I love seeing how deluded I was and marvelling over all that misplaced effort.

It’s not fashionable but I’m potty about the Belgian singer Jack Brel, I could listen to him sing the phone book.

You wouldn’t know it but I’m very good at… moon-walking. I was obsessed with Michael Jackson at school and every day would practise my dance on the lino at school. Who am I kidding? I’m probably no good at it at all.

You may not know it but I’m no good at… giving up a book part-way through, even if I’m not enjoying it. It’s bad manners, like breaking off a conversation halfway through. Perhaps I should learn to be more ruthless.

All my money goes on… books. I read in bursts between jobs as I can’t focus on anything else while I’m working.

If I have time to myself… I walk around London, it’s like going off on a little adventure every time. My cousin gave me a book of routes and their history, called Walk London and I’ve recently done Clerkenwell and Greenwich.

I drive/ride… a bus. However, I did recently – in California – blow my entire budget on a convertible Mustang. It was my Bonnie and Clyde moment (without the murder, I should add).

My house/flat is… a converted open-plan warehouse in a mews in north London. It’s a very creative space but not always practical if one of you is filming and has to leave the house at four in the morning.

My most valuable possession is… my health and that of my loved one. It sounds corny, but next to that all other concerns are irrelevant.

My favourite building… is definitely the National Theatre. My parents took me there as a child and I recall even the distinct smell of the concrete, though I never before knew that concrete had a smell.

Movie heaven… is a good Hitchcock thriller: the danger, the escapism! North By Northwest, preferably. There’s a brilliant sequence with Cary Grant driving drunk down a hill, which has me in hysterics every time.

A book that changed me… recently, my eyes been opened by Chris Ware, the graphic novelist. His books occupy a space between film, poetry and art, both nuanced and melancholic. I haven’t read anything like them before.

My favourite work of art… are the Bernini sculptures, which I saw recently in Rome. I found them miraculous and improbable, you get a vertiginous thrill just being near them. They really stayed with me.

The last album I bought/downloaded… Rachel Unthank and the Winter Set, a Northumbrian folk band with elegant, earthy arrangements.

The person who really makes me laugh… is Larry David, or Paul Merton, or Sarah Silverman. I love well-observed humour about human vanity and people’s delusions.

The shop I can’t walk past… Daunt Books in Marylebone and I’m also a complete sucker for Fresh and Wild, which a friend renamed Fresh and Wildly-expensive, and I’d be inclined to agree. But I still can’t resist their coconut and raisin oatcakes.

The best invention ever… is the camera, and by extension, the cinema, mainly for allowing us to see the past, storytelling and giving knowledge and beauty.

In ten years time, I hope to be… happy, healthy, creatively-fulfilled and maybe have some more walls in my house, at the moment there are none, so it’s not a big ask.

My greatest regret… I try not to, you have to learn and then move on, and if you can’t make amends and accept what’s happened, just move forward.

My life in seven words… hectic, happy, peopled, challenging, varied, gastronomic and unpredictable.

A life in brief

Hattie Morahan was born in 1979 in London. An awardwinning actress, she studied English Literature at New Hall, Cambridge. She won an Ian Charleston award for her part in The Seagull at the National Theatre and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001. Following an acclaimed performance as Elinor Dashwood in Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, she appeared in the Hollywood blockbusters The Golden Compass and The Bank Job. She lives in north London with her partner and stars in The City at the Royal Court from 24 April to 7 June. For tickets, call 020-7565 5000

The Independant

A gang of cockney boys attempt to rob a bank, little realizing they’ve been set up by Her Majesty’s spymasters, in “The Bank Job.

Plot is loosely based on the so-called “walkie-talkie bank job” of 1971, during which a ham-radio operator picked up the two-way communication between a lookout and some burglars who had tunneled into Lloyd’s Bank on Baker Street in Central London.

Hattie Morahan plays a conservative MPs’ daughters in a vivid supporting turn.

Hattie Morahan stars at to the Royal Court Theatre appearing alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in Martin Crimp’s darkly comic mystery, The City, which runs from April 29, (previews from April 24) to June 7, 2008, in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.In The City, three characters fight to make sense of a surreal and collapsing world – Clair who wants to be kissed – but not now – and certainly not by her husband; Chris who wants to celebrate his new job by driving into the oncoming traffic; and Jenny who arrives to complain about the screaming children – but the garden is empty and the key to the playroom has disappeared.

Morahan’s theatre credits include The Seagull and Iphigenia at Aulis, both at the National Theatre and both directed by Katie Mitchell who also directs The City; while on screen, she has appeared in The Bank Job (film) and BBC’s recent production of Sense and Sensibility (as Elinor Dashwood).

Crimp’s Attempts on her Life premiered at the Royal Court in 1997 and was recently revived at the National where it was directed by Katie Mitchell. Crimp and Mitchell’s other collaborations include The Country and Face to the Wall (Royal Court) and The Seagull (National Theatre). Crimp also created the new translation of Rhinoceros for the Royal Court.

The City is designed by Vicki Mortimer, with lighting by Paule Constable and sound by Gareth Fry.