Dame Helen to play the Queen on Broadway

The Audience reunites Dame Helen with playwright Peter Morgan, who scripted the 2006 film The Queen

West End hit The Audience, starring Dame Helen Mirren as the Queen, is to transfer to Broadway next year.

The play, by Frost/Nixon playwright Peter Morgan, sees Dame Helen reprise the role of Queen Elizabeth II, which she played in the 2006 film The Queen.

The Audience imagines the private meetings between the monarch and her prime ministers over her 60-year reign.

Dame Helen won the best actress prizes at last year's Olivier and Evening Standard awards for the stage role.

The play is scheduled to open 8 March and run until 28 June at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in New York, with Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry once again on board to direct.

No other members of the ensemble cast have been announced.

It reunites Dame Helen with Morgan who also scripted The Queen, which won her the best actress Oscar a year later.

'Embraceably human'

Political figures from Winston Churchill through Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron feature in the production, which sees Dame Helen transform herself from a 20-something inexperienced monarch to steely figurehead.

The New York Times's Ben Brantley hailed the actress's London performance as "unimpeachably authoritative", adding "this second Elizabeth II is betraying just enough emotion to make her embraceably human but not enough to embarrass anyone, not even the woman she's playing".

"The 67-year-old Mirren rises to the daunting technical challenge with a quite uncannily fluid lightness of touch as she shifts back and forth on an age-spectrum of six decades," chimed The Independent's Paul Taylor.

The production will mark Dame Helen's third Broadway outing, following performances in Turgenev's A Month in the Country and Strindberg's Dance of Death, opposite Sir Ian McKellen. Both productions earned the actress Tony nominations.

She will shortly be seen in cinemas in Lasse Hallestrom's foodie comedy The Hundred-Foot Journey.