British writer P.G. Wodehouse’s famous duo — unflappable valet Jeeves and incompetent Bertie Wooster — will finally make their debut in London’s West End in 2013.
Actors Matthew Macfadyen and Stephen Mangan will play Jeeves and Bertie Wooster respectively in Perfect Nonsense, which has been adapted from Wodehouse’s The Code Of The Woosters by sibling writing duo Robert and David Goodale.
The play will be presented at Richmond and Brighton theatres in October before the West End opening.
The stage adaptation, directed by Sean Foley, will be presented at the Duke of York’s theatre in November in London.
Wodehouse, the writer of more than 100 books and short story compilations, wrote some 20-odd Jeeves and Wooster books, which were published between 1917 and 1974. The Code of The Woosters, written in 1938, has been adapted twice for radio in the UK and formed the basis for a couple of episodes from the famous television series, Jeeves and Wooster, with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry in the lead, in 1990s.
Wodehouse, who had been captured by the Nazis in 1940 while living in France during the World War II, had made a series of humorous radio broadcasts from Germany in 1941 after his release which caused a huge uproar in Britain and led to accusations that he was a Nazi collaborator.
In fact, Wodehouse never returned to Britain after the war and moved to the United States where he died in 1975 at the age of 93. In November, Sebastian Faulks will publish a new Jeeves and Wooster novel, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, as commissioned by the Wodehouse estate.