Will Judi Dench Return to the London Stage in Hay Fever?

Will Judi Dench be returning to the London stage in 2006? The acclaimed performer has been tapped to star in a revival of Noel Coward's Hay Fever, directed by Peter Hall, according to Variety.

Dench has had a celebrated career on the big screen, on stage and on television. She made her London stage debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company as Ophelia in Hamlet. In 1981, she starred in the British comedy series A Fine Romance opposite her husband, Michael Williams who died of cancer in January 2001. Dench had her first leading role in a feature film in 1997, when she played Queen Victoria in Her Majesty Mrs. Brown, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She won several awards for her role as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love including an Oscar in 1998. Dench returned to Broadway for the first time in almost 40 years to reprise London's Amy's View in 1999. She won a Tony for her performance. The actress most recently appeared on the London stage last year in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of All's Well That Ends Well.

Hay Fever centers on the eccentric Bliss family--recently retired stage actress Judith the role Dench would play, self-absorbed novelist David and their two equally unconventional children. They all invite different guests for the weekend a proper diplomat, a shy flapper, an athletic boxer and a fashionable sophisticate and then chaos ensues when family members start professing to emotions and reacting to situations that do not really exist.

Hay Fever was last seen in the West End at the Savoy Theatre in 1999 in a short-lived production that starred Geraldine McEwan as Judith Bliss and Peter Blythe as David Bliss.