YOU may have seen her in TV’s Coronation Street, but next week, actress Angela Lonsdale joins the cast of a production at the Lawrence Batley Theatre.

Gertrude’s Secret is one of the big shows of the LBT’s drama season. It offers a series of monologues in which audiences meet a string of characters in situations which seem to present them in their most vulnerable states.

Prunella Scales heads the company, playing the title role as the lonely Gertrude waiting for a phone call on her birthday.

She plays the role in Monday’s performance, but Helen Fraser, of Bad Girls fame, will take over from her for Tuesday’s show. Helen will be joined in Tuesday’s cast by Angela, known to many as police officer Emma Watts in the Street.

Both Helen and Angela are well-known faces to TV fans.

Helen, who is from Oldham, has worked in theatre, TV and in film since the Sixties. She is perhaps best known to television viewers for her long-running role in the ITV women's prison drama Bad Girls as warder Sylvia ‘Bodybag’ Hollamby, who she played from the first episode in 1999 to the last in 2006.

She played the same role in the West End production of Bad Girls: The Musical in 2007.

Angela, too, is an experienced actress with a considerable track record of TV work behind heard. She had a long-running part in The Bill, has filmed a guest episode of The Royal and stars in the BBC’s Doctors.

As well as those roles Angela has also appeared in Peak Practice, City Central, The Afternoon Play, The Last Musketeer, Hetty Wainthrop Investigates, Casualty, All Quiet on the Preston Front, A Touch of Frost, Kavanagh QC, Hostage, Byker Grove, The Vanishing Man, Finney, Firm Friends and Who Cares Wins.

She is no stranger to theatre either with credits to her name including Black on White Shorts (Paines Plough), Bluebird (Royal Court),The Mill on the Floss (Contact Theatre, Manchester), Women in Love (Durham Theatre Co) and The Long Line, She Stoops to Conquer, The Sleeping Beauty, And A Nightingale Sang, and Sex, Lies and Tricky Bits all for Northern Stage.

Her radio experience includes Silver Street on the BBC.

The show is written by Benedick West, directed by Andrew Loudon and has already had a London run.

In addition to the story of the lonely Gertrude waiting for that birthday phone call from her daughter there is a tale about a young girl abandoned in a seedy hotel room in Amsterdam, a football hooligan and the posh Candida, whose life is transformed by her Lithuanian au pair.

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