Janet Munsil's play Smoking With Lulu opens tonight at the Soho Theatre, with Thelma Barlow playing silent movie star Louise Brooks.

A three-handed play, it describes the meeting betwen British drama critic Kenneth Tynan and retired silent movie star Louise Brooks in 1979, when Tynan - whose career by then was in steep decline, and who was to die the following year - interviewed the reclusive Brooks for an article in the New Yorker magazine.

The third character on stage, who exists in Tynan's imagination, is Lulu herself - the character played by Brooks in the famous 1929 silent movie Pandora's Box.

Peter Eyre looks and sounds strikingly like Tynan, and Thelma Barlow sheds all memories of her long-running soap opera role as Mavis in Coronation Street as she plays the seventy-something but still feisty actress whose performance in Pandora's Box represented for Tynan the epitome of female sexuality.

For tickets and further information call the Box Office on 020 7478 0100.

—By Theatrenow