West End role for Dawn

Dawn French is to appear in a new West End play, opposite  former Yazoo singer Alison Moyet.

The Vicar of Dibley star will play a schoolteacher caring for her disabled mother in Smaller, which wil be directed by Gimme Gimme Gimme actress Kathy Burke.

Moyet – a long-time friend of French – will play her sister, a singer working on the Costa Del Sol.

French was last on the West End stage in 2003 in the one-woman play My Brilliant Divorce while Moyet has appeared as Mama Morton in the musical Chicago.

The play will tour England for six weeks before opening at London's Lyric Theatre on March 28.

Smaller has been scripted by former Coronation Street and Royle Family writer Carmel Morgan, whose sitcom Teenage Supermodel is currently in development for BBC Three.

Tickets for the play when it visits Milton Keynes, Brighton and Birmingham are available here.

Published: 18 Nov 2005