Donmar Warehouse Announces Full Cast for Peter Gill’s Versailles, Including Francesca Annis

London’s Donmar Warehouse has announced the full ensemble for Versailles, its first play of the spring season. Francesca Annis, Christopher Godwin, Selina Griffiths, Edward Killingback, Adrian Lukis will round out the cast of the theater’s newest drama. Directed and written by Peter Gill, the limited engagement is slated to begin performances February 20, 2014 and play through April 5, with opening night set for February 27.

Alongside Godwin, Griffiths, Killingback, Lukis and Annis, best known for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in Roman Polanski’s film Macbeth, the previously announced cast includes Helen Bradbury, Barbara Flynn, Tom Hughes, Tamla Kari, Gwilym Lee, Josh O’Connor, Simon Williams and Eleanor Yates.

Written for the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of WWI in 1914, Versailles explores the Great War's legacy. The play follows a middle-class English family in Kent. With their son in Paris at the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles, the show is partly a love story and partly an historical examination of the treaty’s ramifications, drawing astonishing conclusions between this pivotal period in history and the state of the modern world.

The Donmar will have an accompanying series of pre-show lecture events for Versailles entitled Impossible Conversations with a variety of speakers discussing the horrors and impact of war including Shami Chakrabarti, A. C. Grayling, Max Hastings, Susie Orbach and Ahdaf Soueif.