TOP stage and screen actress Sheila Allen, recently seen in Love Actually, is to star in a poignant play about a woman's diary to her dead husband at Guildford's Mill Studio.

To My Man is a new play from prestigious Norwegian playwright Finn Carling and will run on Thursday and Friday, July 1 and 2, at 8pm.

The play focuses on recently widowed Felicia. To assuage her loneliness she decides to write a diary as a form of conversation to her absent husband, but her words reveal hidden aspects of her relationship with him.

Soon, the diary begins to affect her relationship with the rest of her family.

Louis Muinzer, who translated the work into English, said the play has echoes of Ibsen's The Doll's House: "Felicia is much, much more than what society takes her to be. She is a person who makes us wonder how well we really know all the seemingly conventional, subservient wives we take for granted.

"She lives far down the years from Ibsen's Nora, but she is like her sister - an intelligent, caring, creative woman compressed into a husband-designed mould."

A regular with the RSC, Sheila Allen (pictured above) has played all the major roles including Lady Macbeth at the Shaw Theatre, Portia at the Old Vic, Gertrude in Hamlet for the Oxford Stage Company and Goneril, Lady Macduff and Lady Capulet for the RSC.

She came to national prominence for her role as Cassie, the wife of Frank Finlay in the TV classic A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, and its sequel Another Bouquet. She starred as Colin Firth's mother in Richard Curtis' Love Actually.

Tickets, costing £10, with concessions available, can be purchased from the Yvonne Arnaud box office on 01483 440000.