TELEVISION actor John McArdle will return to the stage for the first time in over a decade - and Liverpool-born writer Stephen Sharkey will have a new play staged in his home city for the first time.
These were just two of the highlights announced for the new season at the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse theatres this year.
McArdle, a familiar television face after first appearing in Brookside, will be playing in a new production of Timberlake Wertenbaker's modern classic Our Country's Good, opening at the Playhouse in February.
The play, set in Australia in 1788, follows the attempt by a captain to stage a play with convicts.
McArdle has an affinity with the play's situation. As a young man, he had emigrated to Australia and, for a lark, stowed away on a boat to New Zealand with some pals.
They were arrested and spent three months in prison until a British ship agreed to take them out of the country.
Playwright Sharkey has had plays staged in London and Edinburgh but, until now, never in Liverpool.
He wrote his play The May Queen in a rage after the early death of his father at the age of 66, he said.
It also came after he had translated Euripides' tragedy Ion from its original Greek for a London production.
'I wanted to write my own Greek tragedy set in an era that I could understand,' he said.
He chose the May Blitz of 1941 and the story revolves around a daughter seeking revenge after her mother's murder of her father. It opens at the Everyman in May.
For more information and tickets call the Box Office on 0151 709 4776
