Hermione Norris (Spooks), Suranne Jones (Scott & Bailey), Oona Chaplin (The Hour), Kevin Doyle (Downton Abbey), Kerry Fox (An Angel At My Table), Marianne Oldham (WPC 56), Alice St Clair (Atlantis), Jack Gordon (Captain America: The First Avenger), Alex Wyndham (Little Dorrit), Jeremy Swift (Oliver Twist) and Richard Rankin (Black Watch) have been cast in BBC One’s upcoming six episode WWI drama series The Ark. Production on the drama, which forms part of the BBC’s output for the centenary, is slated to commence this month.
Norris has been cast as Grace Carter, the Matron of a First World War hospital in France; Jones as Sister Joan Livesey; Chaplin as Kitty Trevelyan; Doyle as Lt Col Roland Brett, the Chief Officer of the hospital; Fox as Sister Margaret Quayle; Oldham as VAD Rosalie Berwick; St Clair as Flora Marshall; Gordon as Orderly Corporal Peter Foley; Wyndham as Captain Miles Hesketh-Thorne; Swift as Quartermaster Sergeant Reggie Soper; and Rankin as Captain Thomas Gillan.
Created by Sarah Phelps, The Ark is a six episode period drama series set during World War I in a tented field hospital on the coast of France, where a team of doctors, nurses and women volunteers work together to heal the bodies and souls of men wounded in the trenches. The hospital is a frontier: between the battlefield and home front, but also between the old rules, hierarchies, class distinctions and a new way of thinking. BBC Drama Production is producing, with Annie Tricklebank serving as producer. The executive producers are Sarah Phelps and Anne Pivcevic. David Evans, Richard Clark and Thaddeus O’Sullivan are attached to direct.
