The actor talks about her part in launching #FeedNHS — and her role in Terence Rattigan’s ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, now streamed by the National Theatre
by Sarah Hamming | Financial Times | July 10, 2020
It’s hard to write about what Helen McCrory got up to during lockdown. Not because it was bad. Quite the reverse, in fact. In March, she and her fellow-actor husband Damian Lewis launched #FeedNHS, a scheme to provide food to front-line workers. By the height of the pandemic, it was serving 45,000 meals daily to 115 hospitals across the country.
No, the trouble is that any write-up that makes this sound remotely saintly would drive her bananas. Frank, funny and down to earth, McCrory, 51, has a fierce aversion to anything pretentious (this is a woman who, on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, chose the complete works of Spike Milligan as her luxury book, wrapped in a Bertrand Russell dust jacket “just in case anybody sees me, from another island”).
The fact of the matter, she says pragmatically, is that she and Lewis (who played Nicholas Brody in the TV series Homeland) realised that high-profile names could open doors and get things moving. “
If you have names people recognise, then you can get them on the phone. Not because they like your work, but because they know who the hell you are and they’re having a lot of phone calls. And once you’ve got them on the phone, then you can reassure them that you will not be doing any cooking . . . ”
You can see why people would listen to her — she’s terrific company, even on the phone. And that mischievous, deadpan humour often comes through in performance. It’s definitely there in her Cherie Blair in Stephen Frears’ 2006 film The Queen. It’s there too in Hester Collyer, Terence Rattigan’s great, desolate heroine — the role we are here to talk about. Carrie Cracknell’s exquisite 2016 staging of Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea is the latest in the National Theatre’s online streaming programme. The theatre’s website describes Hester as “one of the greatest female roles in contemporary drama” and it’s hard to disagree.
Written in 1952, the play is set in a cheap lodging house, where Hester has taken up with Freddie, a former RAF pilot, leaving behind her respectable judge husband and elegant Eaton Square home. But it’s soon clear that she has gambled and lost. Freddie, damaged by the war and fast disappearing down the neck of a bottle, can’t return her love. When the play opens, Hester has just attempted, unsuccessfully, to kill herself.
McCrory’s performance is, frankly, superb. She catches the desperation in Hester, the humiliation at her own despair (the scene where she begs Freddie to stay is toe-curling) but also the acute intelligence and self-awareness. Even at her most poised, she seems haunted, suspended — as if still floating in that foggy deep of near-death. It’s immensely moving.
She admits that she shared many people’s vague preconceptions about Rattigan as all “cocktail makers and golf clubs and tweed” until she read the play: “When you read it, you realise this is a play about desperate love and fragile, broken people. It has an ache and a longing to it throughout the whole piece. Every night, before I went on, I listened to the Amy Winehouse song ‘You Know I’m No Good’.”
The play unfolds over one day, with Hester never stirring from that flat, which becomes both her prison and her cocoon. Cracknell’s staging pulls us into Hester’s mindset: when the play opens, we hear the muffled sounds of her panicked neighbours as she swims in semi-consciousness; the house, with its translucent walls and watery lighting, seems to be submerged with her.
“Tom Scutt’s set is like the skeleton of a house,” says McCrory. “You can see everybody watching each other, you can hear everybody down the corridors, and the whispers and the sounds. We all know that feeling — that sense when you feel ashamed that everyone can see into your soul. So there’s no escape, there’s no place you can hide.”
Much of the pain in the piece is drawn from personal experience: Rattigan wrote it after his secret former lover, Kenny Morgan, took his own life. But that aching loss is sewn into a brilliant, sometimes drily funny, but very poignant depiction of the 1950s. Through the characters we see a scarred society: a group of people struggling on in repressive, postwar Britain. It’s certainly an antidote to any nostalgic notions about the “good old days” — an astute choice, perhaps, by the National Theatre right now. “
They would [originally] have been performing it to audiences who had all lost people or who had almost been lost themselves,” says McCrory. “And to many people who didn’t know what they were living for, but they were going to continue living.”
Rattigan’s empathy with his heroine and his honesty about the temptation to succumb to that deep, blue sea is profoundly moving. But there’s also a quiet wisdom in her neighbour’s advice to “go on living”. Rattigan, like Chekhov, celebrates the sheer effort it can take just to keep on going. When McCrory cracks an egg into a pan at the end of the play, you can feel the audience’s hope. It’s so simple, so ordinary and so revealing. She says she’s sure of Hester’s decision. “
I can feel it, playing the part,” she says. “Because when you work on a piece by any good playwright, they work you like you’re an athlete. So you feel their tempo.” When you stand in front of an audience, they will tell you in one breath whether they believe it or not It’s possible, she says, that her own background has helped her to read characters out of step with their surroundings (such as her award-winning Medea).
As a diplomat’s daughter, McCrory spent her childhood moving round the globe: “It makes you realise there is no such thing as normal. It teaches you to adapt and it makes you not frightened of change. You can’t stop it, so why not embrace it?” That resilience was tested when, aged 17, she was turned down by London’s Drama Centre. A year later, she was back, wielding a heap more life experience and a fistful of letters she had written to other prestigious drama schools rejecting their offers. She got in. Some would have given up. Why was she so determined? “
I was just so inspired by their honesty,” she says. “There’s no point in a director telling you that you’ve been wonderful in rehearsal for six weeks, because when you stand in front of an audience, they will tell you in one breath whether they believe it or not. They tell you straight away: speed up that bit; that bit’s boring; you’ve got to do something with that. And the Drama Centre was just very thorough: it was vigorous and acting was offered as a craft. It was a job. It wasn’t some sort of wishy-washy, waiting-for-the-muse-to-take-you nonsense.”
Like all performers, McCrory’s professional life is currently on hold: she was meant to be filming with Girls creator Lena Dunham and shooting a new series of TV’s Peaky Blinders (she plays the matriarch Aunt Polly). But she is also hoping to do a production with Lewis: details still under wraps. Would it be funny? “Yes,” she says. “I love good comedy. And I love finding comedy in the darkest moments too.”
It’s the audience presence she misses most, she says: that live connection that is hard to replicate anywhere else. “You’re walking out on to a stage with over a thousand people’s energy right on you. You can feel that energy. It’s absolutely tangible. And it gives you an enormous freedom. You’re more anarchic on stage than you are anywhere else.”
‘The Deep Blue Sea’ runs to July 16, nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home