"I've got a yen for her and I don't mean a Chinese coin"

Passionate and funny, Awake and Sing! beautifully captures the hopes and struggles in a frenetic family apartment in the Bronx.

Bessie, played by Stockard Channing, is the strong-willed matriarch of an extended Jewish family in the 1930s. Striving to force her daughter into a marriage of convenience and her son out of a relationship she believes is beneath him, she tirelessly wages war against the idealism of a family she longs to protect.

Clifford Odets is one of America’s finest twentieth century playwrights, who along with Eugene O’Neill effectively invented modern drama.  Awake and Sing! was revived on Broadway last year starring Zoe Wannamaker and Mark Ruffalo and won two Tony Awards, including Best Revival.

Michael Attenborough directs Awake and Sing!  As Artistic Director of the Almeida Theatre, his recently acclaimed productions include Playing with Fire at the National Theatre, and The Mercy Seat, The Late Henry Moss, Enemies, There Came a Gypsy Riding and Big White Fog for the Almeida.

Award-winning American stage, film, and television actor Stockard Channing will play Bessie, last seen in London in The Exonerated at Riverside Studios. On television she is best known for her role as First Lady Abbey Bartlet in the hugely popular US drama series, The West Wing. Her film credits include Six Degrees of Separation, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, Up Close and Personal, Moll Flanders, Bright Young Things, Business of Strangers and Grease, in which she played Rizzo.