Mercury Theatre announces full cast for Mark Ravenhill’s BLACKMAIL

Directed by Anthony Banks, classic thriller Blackmail has been adapted for stage by Mark Ravenhill and will run at the Mercury Theatre from 4-19 March. 

The production sees Gabriel Akuwudike (1917, Troilus and Cressida) take on the role of Howard Webber, alongside Jessie Hills (The Feed, Call The Midwife) as Alice Jarvis, Patrick Walshe McBride (Great Expectations, Shakespeare and Hathaway: Private Investigators) as Ian Tracy and Lucy Speed (Eastenders, The Bill, After Life) in the role of Ada Jarvis. 

Ravenhill said: “Charles Bennett constantly revised and rewrote his play Blackmail throughout his life. It was one of the first plays he wrote as a young actor in the early 1920s. He revised it before and after the 1928 West End production and participated in Hitchcock's 1929 film reworking. He was working on a new version for a potential Hollywood film shortly before his death in 1995. I've had the great good fortune of being given access by his estate to the various manuscripts. Working from these, I've created a new version of Blackmail for a contemporary audience." 

"The plot is all Bennett's, about half the dialogue is mine. My aim has been to make the joins 'invisible', to imagine as best I can what Bennett would do if he had another go at shaping the play for a production in 2022”.

Blackmail is a chilling work from Bennett, following Ian Tracy as he blackmails shop worker Alice and her policeman fiancé Harold. Alice's mother Ada does her best to dig out the truth, but it cannot possibly end well for them all… 

For more information and to book tickets, please click here.