The Finborough Theatre has announced some radical casting for a new production – Cooper, the 10-year-old German Shepherd.
Cooper, who lives in Chelsea, will pad the floorboards as the character imaginatively called ‘Dog’ in Men’s Business, a love story set in the back room of a butcher’s shop. He plays “a brutal bastard of a dog” and gets to howl – a lot.
Men’s Business is the ‘world premiere’ of Tony and Olivier Award winner Simon Stephens’ new translation of German playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz’s rarely performed work Mannersache. It arrives at the Finborough following a sell-out run at the Glass Mask Theatre in Dublin.
Cooper will star alongside Lauren Farrell (Charlie) and Rex Ryan (Victor) in the production at the theatre in Finborough Road, SW10. The play opens on 18th March and runs for four weeks until 12th April.
According to his official biography, Cooper was one of five pure-bred puppies by a Polish mother and an English father. He is a Certified Assistance Dog, who “enjoys going to the cinema, the theatre”. In particular, his biog’ notes, he likes “going on shopping trips to Whole Foods in Kensington” and “his favourite sport is playing ball and he loves riding the Tube, where he likes to go up and down the carriage meeting passengers”. It sounds like he is well-suited to the stage.
Tickets can be booked here.
Some further reading from the Finborough:
Multi-award-winning playwright Simon Stephens is one of the UK’s most prolific contemporary playwrights and his work is produced across the world. The author of more than twenty stage plays, he is a former tutor on the Royal Court Young Writers Programme. His many awards include the Pearson Award for Best New Play, 2001, for Port; Olivier Award for Best New Play for On the Shore of the Wide World, 2005; and for Motortown German critics in Theater Heute’s annual poll voted him Best Foreign Playwright, 2007. His adaptation of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play.
His plays include Bluebird (Royal Court Theatre), Herons (Royal Court), Port (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester), One Minute (Crucible Theatre and Bush Theatre), Christmas (Bush Theatre), Country Music (Royal Court Theatre Upstairs), On the Shore of the Wide World (Royal Exchange Theatre and National Theatre), Motortown (Royal Court Theatre Downstairs), Pornography (Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hanover, Edinburgh Festival, Birmingham Rep, and Tricycle Theatre), Harper Regan (National Theatre), Sea Wall (Bush Theatre and Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh), Heaven (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh), Punk Rock (Lyric Hammersmith and Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester), The Trial of Ubu (Essen Schauspielhaus and Toneelgroep Amsterdam), A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky co-written with David Eldridge and Robert Holman (Lyric Hammersmith), Marine Parade co-written with Mark Eitzel (Brighton International Festival), T5 (Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh), Wastwater (Royal Court Theatre Downstairs), Morning (Lyric Hammersmith), an adaptation of A Doll’s House (Young Vic), an adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (National Theatre), Blindsided (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester), Birdland (Royal Court Theatre), Carmen Disruption(Deutsches Schauspielhaus and Almeida Theatre), The Funfair (Home Theatre); Heisenberg (Manhatton Theatre Club,), Song From Faraway (Young Vic), The Threepenny Opera(National Theatre) Nuclear War (Royal Court Theatre), Obsession (Barbican), Lightfalls (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester), Morning Sun (Manhattan Theatre Club), Blindness(Donmar Warehouse), Fortune (Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre).
Writer, actor, and film director Franz Xaver Kroetz was born in Munich in 1946. One of Germany’s most popular contemporary dramatists, he rose to fame as a playwright in the early 1970s when the premiere of his plays Heimarbeit (Houseworker) and Hartnäckig (Persistent) was disrupted by neo-fascists. His work has been translated and performed internationally. UK productions include Through The Leaves, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001 and at the Southwark Playhouse in 2002, The Nest, staged at The Young Vic in 2016, and Tom Fool, seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in 2022. He is also well known to international audiences for his plays Farmyard (Stallerhof) and Request Concert (Wunschkonzert). In addition to playwriting, Kroetz has written for numerous television series and has acted in several films and TV series. He has received many awards including the Deutscher Kritikerpreis, Bertolt-Brecht-Literaturpreis and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.