House of Desires

Kristin Scott Thomas, the English film star long resident in Paris, will be Eurostarring her way to the West End in the fall to lead the little-known Pirandello play "As You Desire Me" in a new version by Hugh Whitemore ("Breaking the Code"). The director/designer team is Jonathan Kent and Paul Brown.

Rehearsals start Sept. 19, followed by an opening night a month or so later at a theater still to be named. (Duncan C. Weldon, co-producer with Paul Elliott, told Variety he is mulling over four prospective venues.) Pirandello has been a fairly regular West End presence of late, between the recent production of "Absolutely! (perhaps)," with Joan Plowright, and, further back, the commercial transfer of Kent's own Almeida staging of "Naked," starring Juliette Binoche.

Oscar-nommed for "The English Patient," Scott Thomas made her West End debut in spring 2003, playing Masha in Chekhov's "Three Sisters." This time around, says Weldon, the actress plays "a mysterious lady" in 1920s Europe caught up in a typically Pirandellian dilemma: "Is she who she says she is, or isn't she?" to quote Weldon.

Kent told Variety he was pleased with this piece of star casting. "This is a great part for Kristin. The role is a kind of tabula rasa: a blank sheet onto which people write their own needs and desires." Quite a lot of other people, in fact: The play has a cast of 16.

"As You Desire Me," presumably, is not to be confused with another West End title, arriving in June: Shakespeare's "As You Like It."

All in the family

Like sister, like brother: Corin Redgrave will make his debut this season at Shakespeare's Globe, playing the title role in "Pericles," which starts performances May 20 and will open June 2 as the second in this season's four-play program: three from the Bard and a new Peter Oswald play titled "The Storm."

Actress and sometime-helmer Kathryn Hunter (Complicite's "The Visit," the Almeida premiere of "Whistling Psyche") will direct the picaresque "Pericles."

"The Tempest," directed by Tim Carroll and starring Globe a.d. Mark Rylance as Prospero, kicks off the Globe lineup from May 7 (opening May 18), while a John Dove-helmed "The Winter's Tale," with Paul Jesson as the jealous Leontes, brings up the rear, starting June 4.

In coming to the Globe, Redgrave frereis following where his sister, Vanessa, has already trod. It was she, in a notable case of transgender casting, who played Prospero (mighty eccentrically, one has to say) in the Globe's last "Tempest," in 2000.

Corin Redgrave comes to Pericles having already this year played Lear on the West End for the Royal Shakespeare Co., followed by Kenneth Tynan in Richard Nelson's acclaimed solo show about the English theater critic and essayist.

This year's Globe season marks the 10th and final one under the tutelage of Rylance, who, if his stunning performance in the recent Channel 4 telefilm "The Government Inspector" is anything to go on, has quite a freelance career ahead once he moves on.

Sher thing

You've seen the play, now read the book: Actually, even if you didn't catch Antony Sher's fleeting National Theater engagement as Primo Levi in the solo play "Primo" (reprised earlier this year at the Hampstead), it's worth picking up a copy of "Primo Time," Sher's latest -- and best -- diary account of a singular actor's no less singular investigative process. (The book costs £9.99, or $19, from U.K. publisher Nick Hern Books.)

Among other things, "Primo Time" chronicles an enduring personal partnership (Sher's with director Greg Doran) as well as the sometime vexatious but always productive professional teamwork between Sher and "Primo" helmer Richard Wilson, down to fierce debates about what clothes to wear.

The book is good on domestic minutiae as well as larger social and political truths, and it is movingly punctuated by the actor's ongoing open letter to his subject, who died, an apparent suicide, in his native Turin, Italy, in 1987. If all goes well, "Primo" will be seen on Broadway in the 2005-06 season; this book further whets the appetite.