Actor Kristin Scott Thomas is to play Queen Elizabeth II in the West End. Photograph: Joel Ryan/Invision

Kristin Scott Thomas to star as the Queen in return of The Audience

This article is more than 9 years old

New version of Peter Morgan’s play to open in London as Helen Mirren, lauded for portrayal of Elizabeth II, stars in Broadway run

Kristin Scott Thomas will play the role of the Queen in a new version of Peter Morgan’s West End hit The Audience next year.

The role was originally played by Helen Mirren at the Gielgud Theatre in 2013 and won her an Olivier award for best actress. Scott Thomas’s version will open at the Apollo theatre on 5 May 2015, while Mirren stars in the role on Broadway.

Kristin Scott Thomas is receiving enthusiastic reviews for her performance in the Sophocles tragedy Electra at the Old Vic. Her career across stage and screen has spanned three decades, with memorable roles in Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral and Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient.

The Audience charts the second Elizabethan Age, from the beginning of the Queen’s reign in 1952 to her Diamond jubilee in 2012. It imagines a series of critical meetings between various UK prime ministers and the Queen over her 60-year reign. Prime ministers from Churchill to Cameron use their private audiences with the monarch to confess their worries and talk through the country’s problems. As prime ministers come and go, the Queen stays constant, ready to welcome the next incumbent.

Playwright Peter Morgan is reportedly considering updating the play to include Tony Blair.

Morgan is perhaps best known for writing the screenplays for the films Frost/Nixon and Stephen Frears’ The Queen, which also starred Mirren.