Ian McDiarmid

Ian McDiarmid Interview

Shakespearean actor and Tony award winner Ian McDiarmid will be forever etched on the minds of cinema-goers as the evil Senator Palpatine in the Star Wars franchise. He is now stepping into the shoes of the late Ian Richardson to play a school headmaster in the Radio 4 drama series The Pickerskill Reports.

Keily Oakes, BBC News, 27th August 2009

The first series of this fictional schoolmaster memoir, The Pickerskill Detentions, starred the late Ian Richardson as the crafty teacher who delivers rough justice to his more difficult pupils. That play packed such a narrative punch that, four years on, it's still fresh in the memory, and this follow-up promises to do the same. Ian McDiarmid takes on the role and pits himself against an apparently perfect choirboy who has a nice little sideline in extortion and theft.

A paean, in a way, to original thought, it's also a rumination on the sliding scale of crime and punishment and the difficulty of knowing exactly where to draw the line.

Time Out, 27th August 2009