Cast announced for the premiere of Peter Arnott’s Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape

Casting has been announced for the premiere of Peter Arnott’s new play Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape.

Co-produced by Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, the show opens at Pitlochry Festival Theatre from 25 August – 28 September before running at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh from 4 – 14 October.

Directed by Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh’s Artistic Director David Greig, Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape will feature John Michie as Rennie, Sally Reid as Emma, Nalini Chetty as Jitka, Benny Young as Moon, Deirdre Davis as Edie, Matthew Trevannion as Charlie, Keith Macpherson as Frank, Patricia Panther as Kath and Robbie Scott as Will.

Set in a Perthshire country house during the Scottish Independence referendum of 2014, Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape revolves around retired academic and political heavyweight George Rennie, and his fractured family and former students, coming together for a dramatic reckoning. There are secrets to be exposed and truths to be told.

Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape is an exploration of a way of life that is coming to its end, a family struggling to connect in the wake of political pain, the experience of grief, and the beginnings, and endings of great love affairs.

The production is designed by Jessica Worrall, with lighting by Simon Wilkinson and sound by Pippa Murphy.

Writer Peter Arnott said: “Group Portrait in a Summer Landscape is, for me, both a welcome return to Pitlochry, and the chance to do a big new play about who we are, where we’ve just been, and where we might go now.

“The play is about the complex history behind every family snapshot. In this instance, an ultra-liberal well-educated and well-fed Scottish family with a summer house in Perthshire, living the perfect life in the perfect place at the perfect time.

“The truth is that I’ve been thinking about these people for so long…since the end of the 1980s, in fact, that their lives and mine (and ours, I hope) are all so intertwined by now that I can’t tell where reality stops, and fiction begins. They are very real to me, and, with an outstanding ensemble of actors, I am thrilled that their reality will soon be taking on three dimensions in front of an audience!”

For more information and tickets, visit www.pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com and lyceum.org.uk