Walliams gets Dream Shakespeare gig

David Walliams is to star as Bottom in a new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, opposite Sheridan Smith as queen of the fairies Titania.

The pair have been cast in the Shakespearean comedy by director Michael Grandage as part of his 14-month tenancy at the Noel Coward theatre in London's West End.

Britain's Got Talent judge David will play Bottom, the fool whose head is turned into that of a donkey by mischievous fairy Puck. Titania then falls in love with Bottom after Oberon, King of the Fairies puts a love spell on her to teach her a lesson after a lovers' tiff. And Grandage has promised to make it a sexy production.

He told The Daily Mail: "When I met Sheridan and David, I said 'Let's make it a really, absolutely sexual production."

Meanwhile, Grandage has also announced the casting of Dame Judi Dench and Ben Wishaw in John Logan's new drama Peter And Alice.

Dame Judi will play Alice Liddell Hargreaves, the woman who, as a girl, inspired Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland. Ben will play Peter Llewelyn Davies, who as a boy inspired JM Barrie to write Peter Pan.

Alice met Peter in 1932, aged 80, when she opened an exhibition he organised to celebrate the centenary of Lewis Carroll's birth. The play imagines what Alice and Peter might have said to one another during that brief meeting.

And Grandage has also cast Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe in Martin McDonagh's play The Cripple Of Inishmaan. The play is about a young man with a withered hand and foot, who lives off the west coast of Ireland but dreams of escaping the island where he has grown up.