Malcolm Sinclair stars in Intimate Letters 2012 Tour

Malcolm Sinclair, the award-winning actor who has appeared extensively at the National Theatre, in the West End and on Broadway, joins Sheffield-based Ensemble 360 for Intimate Letters, the concert based on Janacek’s Second String Quartet.

He will perform a monologue compiled from Janacek’s own passionate letters to a much younger married woman between movements of the quartet the letters inspired. Put together by writer Paul Allen, it traces not only the inspiration and musical material in the work itself but some of Janacek’s life story in the emerging Czechoslovakia of the 1920s as well as the bitter-sweet love story of the composer and the young mother Kamila Stosslova.

Sinclair has played historical creative artists before. He was Terence Rattigan at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 2011 in Nicholas Wright’s Rattigan’s Nijinsky and before that played Benjamin Britten in Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art at the National Theatre. At the National he has also played the headmaster in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, in which he appeared on Broadway, and he won the Clarence Derwent award when appearing at the National in Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden, two plays that took place simultaneously in adjoining auditoriums. He starred as Jeeves for Ayckbourn and Andrew Lloyd Webber in By Jeeves, which opened the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough and transferred to the West End.

As President of the actors’ trade union, Equity, he campaigns actively for regional theatre in particular.

The ‘Intimate Letters’ concert begins with Schubert’s String Quintet in C, D956. The musicians are Claudia Ajmone-Marsan (violin), Judith Busbridge (viola), Laurene Durantel (double bass), Benjamin Nabarro (violin) and Gemma Rosefield (cello).

Tour dates

Friday 10 February: Emmanuel Church, Barnsley
Sunday 12 February: Bridge House Theatre, Warwick
Saturday 25 February: Priory Place Church, Doncaster
Sunday 26 February: Maidment Hall, Shrewsbury
Monday 12 March: New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme