From left: Brian Cox, in Paul Smith, will reprise his West End performance as
J.S. Bach in The Score when it comes to Washington, DC, in September. “It feels more pertinent now,” he says, “and even more ironic exploring corruption in Washington, given who is running the show.” Letitia Wright wears a Max Mara dress. Josephine Thiesen wears Akris. Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons.Photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Vogue, September 2026.
“It’s about power,” says Harriet Walter, the 75-year-old theatrical legend, on the first hot day of an English summer, finger sandwich in hand, yellowing fields of West Sussex wilting away through the train windows behind her. “The regime change, the morality of war…,” she plows on, in floor-length Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda, “…the brutal decisions that have to be made.”
Actor Archie Madekwe leans in, enraptured by her take on Phyllida Lloyd’s all-women Julius Caesar, which opens in Stratford (with Walter as Brutus) this November. Madekwe, 31, is already deep in his run of Simon Stone’s The Oresteia at London’s The Bridge.
When Madekwe lets slip to the actors aboard Belmond’s deliciously Deco British Pullman—commandeered today by Vogue to celebrate the launch of a new Baz Luhrmann– and Catherine Martin–designed carriage—that he has secretly filmed a Madonna video with Kate Moss and Benedict Cumberbatch, they fall on him as though he were carrion.
The clutch of productions represented by the group in this story will define the theatrical calendar this autumn. There’s Brian Cox (marvelously grumpy in The Score, coming to Washington, DC, in September), Letitia Wright (appearing in the newsroom play The Story at the National), Mason Alexander Park (angelic-voiced and scene-stealing in Broadway’s Much Ado About Nothing, in previews from October), Sadie Soverall (a standout in the London production of John Proctor Is the Villain, which is getting another West End run early next year), and Josephine Thiesen (who recently played Alice in a staging of Alice in Wonderland in Hamburg, and will soon be seen in Tom Ford’s next film Cry to Heaven).
The shoot is a fashion play: lovers, schemers, ingenues, villains, braggarts, all under the direction of photographer Annie Leibovitz. The actor Luke Thompson, dozing in a brocade chair (and soon to play opposite Keira Knightley in The Lives of Others at the Adelphi), takes the temperature best: “With film and TV you’re not there when the audience is unwrapping their present. In theater—that charged feeling. It’s electric.”
He smiles, watching Park take a turn through the carriage in magenta Valentino couture. “You have to really believe in it.”
In this story: makeup, Lisa Houghton; manicurist, Michelle Humphrey; tailor, Della George.
