Niall Sheehy is the new Charlie in HIM, Natalie Ekberg's play about a contemporary LGBTQ+ family, which runs at the Union Theatre from 19-30 October 2026.
Niall Sheehy, whose West End credits include Feuilly in Les Misérables, takes on the role of Charlie in HIM at the Union Theatre in Southwark. He steps in for Dan Furlonger, whose casting had already been announced and who has withdrawn from the production because of a scheduling clash.
Directed by Simon Fielding, the play has its press night on Wednesday 21 October 2026 at 7.30pm. Sheehy completes a five-strong company alongside Hannah Chalmers as Jane, Alan P. Jones as Kit, Gary Tushaw as Osmond and Julie Wood as Nana.
Sheehy arrives with a CV built largely on big musicals. He was most recently seen in the UK tour of The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical. His other credits include Barrett in Titanic the Musical, in the West End and on its international tour, and Raoul, Vicomte de Chagny in the Asia tour of Love Never Dies.
The rest of the company come with stage and screen credits of their own. Chalmers was most recently seen in ITV's Coronation Street, and Jones appeared in the BBC's Waiting for the Out. Tushaw has played Noël Coward in Noël & Gertie at Mayflower Studios and Leicester Curve, and Buckingham in Richard III at the Ovo Theatre, while Wood was last on stage in the UK tour of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
Ekberg's play begins with an arrangement made in good faith. When Jane finds she is unexpectedly pregnant by Charlie, she agrees that he and his new partner, Osmond, will bring the child up. As time goes on, doubt, old resentments and divided loyalties start to pull that understanding apart. The piece mixes dark comedy with raw feeling, and deliberately offers no easy moral verdict on the choices its characters make for the people they love.
Ekberg works across film, television and theatre. Her screen work includes That Girl Peugeot, now on Prime Video, alongside commissions for ITV and SNTV, and her earlier play Diversifications went from a London run to the Women Voices Festival in the USA, where it won one of the main awards.
Fielding has co-produced and directed the annual pantomime at the Towngate Theatre in Basildon for the past 16 years, earning Best Director at the 2024 UK Pantomime Awards, and his Offie-nominated A Little Night Music ran at Ye Olde Rose and Crown in London. He has also spent 38 years acting in theatre and television, with credits including Grease and Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens in the West End, Emmerdale, Coronation Street and London's Burning. The subject is a personal one for him: he is one of two dads to daughters Inès and Juno, who were born through surrogacy in the US.
Performances are Monday to Friday at 7.30pm, with Sunday shows at 2pm and 6pm. The play lasts 90 minutes without an interval, and tickets are £28, or £25 for concessions. The Union Theatre is at 229 Union Street, London SE1 0LR, in the Old Union Yard Arches.
