Rachel Weisz tops list of powerful women in London theatre
5 March 2009
A 22-YEAR-OLD playwright, Hollywood star Rachel Weisz and Kevin Spacey's business partner have been named among the most powerful women in London theatre.
Writer Polly Stenham, 22, whose debut play That Face became a dazzling hit two years ago and transferred to the West End, is described as the "wunderkind" of the capital's stage scene.
Her new play Tusk Tusk is set to open at the Royal Court later this month and That Face, which "laid bare the misery" at the heart of an upper middle-class family, is being made into a film.
Says Harper's Bazaar, which has compiled the list of the 20 hottest female theatre talents: "Her coruscating play was... one of the most astonishing debuts of the last 30 years [and] heralded the arrival of a precocious new talent".
The 'power list' also features actress Weisz, 38, who is set to storm the capital playing the iconic Blanche DuBois in a Donmar staging of A Streetcar Named Desire.
But her pedigree is more than that - having set up her own theatre company as a Cambridge student and forged her career on-stage.
Weisz, who is set to lure new audiences to the West End in Streetcar, says: Theatre is where I started, and it's real acting. Nothing compares to it."
Other high flyers include impresario Sally Greene, who rescued the Old Vic and installed Kevin Spacey as its creative director, restored the Richmond Theatre and the Criterion and persuaded Elton John to write the Billy Elliot score.
Actress Gillian Anderson has gone from X-Files alien-hunting to the adopted grande dame of the British stage - and returns in a new version of Ibsen's A Doll's House at the Donmar this May.
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