Warren Carlyle will direct two invited readings of For the Love of Miss Lucy, a new gothic comedy by Mary Lynn Dobson, at Underbelly Boulevard Soho on Thursday 1 October 2026. Victoria Smurfit and Jeremy Swift lead a company of eight assembled for the day, which is being staged for investors and agents rather than for a paying audience.
The Tony Award-winning director and choreographer Warren Carlyle will spend a morning and an afternoon in Soho on Thursday 1 October 2026 with a play that does not yet have a theatre. For the Love of Miss Lucy, a darkly comic gothic thriller by the American playwright Mary Lynn Dobson, gets two rehearsed readings that day at Underbelly Boulevard Soho, at 11am and 2pm, in front of invited investors, agents and creatives. Rehearsals begin on 24 September 2026.
The company is the reason the announcement carries. Victoria Smurfit, lately Maud O’Hara in the Disney+ adaptation of Rivals, reads Lucy; the Emmy-nominated Jeremy Swift, Leslie Higgins in Ted Lasso and the Dowager Countess’s butler Spratt in Downton Abbey, reads Dr Seward. Morgan Watkins, seen in HBO’s Under Salt Marsh, takes Dracula; Harry Peacock, Ray Purchase in Toast of London, reads Jonathan Harker; and the BAFTA Award-winning Luke Rollason, Jizzlord in the Disney+ series Extraordinary, takes Renfield. Sally Rogers, Jo Masters through many years of The Bill, reads the Nurse, with Bailey Patrick as Beetleston and Stephen Boxer as Graves.
Dobson sets the Dracula story inside a drawing room. Her play unfolds in a 1920s English sanatorium where Lucy Seward falls gravely ill soon after a mysterious Count arrives, and where her brother sends for Professor Abraham Van Helsing, billed as the leading authority on afflictions nobody can explain. The residents begin behaving strangely, Van Helsing concludes that illness is not what he is looking at, and the tone the writing reaches for is closer to Noël Coward than to Bram Stoker, with the horror arriving underneath the wit.
Carlyle is the most decorated name attached to it. He has been nominated for four Tony Awards and eight Drama Desk Awards, and has won a Tony, two Drama Desk Awards, three Outer Critics Circle Awards and the Astaire Award for choreography; an Emmy nomination followed Carousel for Live at Lincoln Center. His Broadway work includes The Music Man with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, and Hello, Dolly! with Bette Midler. He has a London date in the diary as well: he directs and choreographs the concert staging of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes that plays the London Palladium for three performances on 26-27 March 2027.
Behind the reading, Black Irish Productions produces, with the Tony Award-winning Thomas Hopkins as executive producer, general management by THP and casting by the Emmy-nominated Rob Kelly CDA. Dobson’s earlier plays include The Somewhat True Tale of Robin Hood, Two on the Aisle—Three in a Van and Skin Deep, a winner of the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival.
Nothing here is on sale. Both readings are invitation-only, and no theatre, run or production dates have been announced beyond 1 October, so the world premiere in the billing is a statement of intent rather than a date in a diary. A presentation of this kind exists to find the money for the production that might follow, which is why the room is investors and agents rather than critics — and why the announcement worth waiting for is the one that names a venue.
