Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham star in Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle

Two of Britain’s most respected actors will star in a new play Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle from the creative team behind the international multi award-winning sensation The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Award-winning Anne-Marie Duff is best known for Nowhere Boy, for which she won the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actress and awards for Best Supporting Actress from the London Film Critics’ Circle and the BIFA. Fans will know her for roles in Shameless and The Virgin Queen, and on stage most recently in Common at the Royal National Theatre and Oil at the Almeida.

Kenneth Cranham has appeared in numerous films including Layer Cake, Gangster No. 1, Rome, Oliver! and Hellbound: Hellraiser II. His stage credits include Entertaining Mr Sloane, Loot, The Birthday Party and Gaslight. For his role as Inspector Goole in An Inspector Calls, he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award, and in 2016, Cranham won the Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role as Andre in The Father, a production which received a five-star review from every leading national press publication.

In Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle, which is supported by Bruno Wang Productions and was hailed as a “soaring, suspenseful, thrilling and wondrous play” on its Broadway debut – Duff and Cranham play a couple who meet by chance at a London train station before embarking on a complicated relationship.

The production is the work of director Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Angels in America) and playwright Simon Stephens (Fatherland, Pornography). Of the play, Stephens said recently in an interview with What’s On Stage: “I wanted to try and release the instinctive, the unpredictable. I knew how the characters were affecting each other, but didn’t know what they were going to say next. It was daring and uncertain, and exciting.”

The interview revealed that Elliott and Stephens grew up catching the same bus together, a fact that was only recently discovered: “I was 14 and Marianne was 16. We used to go to school together on the same bus, though we didn’t know who the other one was and we didn’t talk. She was the cool sixth former.”

Since then the pair have reacquainted professionally, having worked together on a number of productions including, most famously, the National Theatre, West End and international tour of A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.
Elliott commented in the same interview: “What I’m drawn to in Simon’s work is that there’s a huge world that goes beyond the lines and script. There’s a well of yearning in these characters, and there’s so much emotion. You’re looking at these two characters as if through a microscope, but the world still moved around them in a way that was unpredictable and exciting, and very beautiful.”