helenistic, Author at Helen McCrory

As You Like It at Wyndham’s Theatre – Review

On June 22, 2005April 30, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Call off the phones : Sienna Miller as Celia and Helen McCrory as Rosalind in As You Like It

Michael Billington | June 22, 2005 | The Guardian

Hymen sings of “most strange events” and this is certainly one of them: a piece of star-driven, West End Shakespeare full of whimsical absurdities and coarse acting. Yet I can forgive almost everything for the sake of a Rosalind as vibrant and compelling as Helen McCrory.

But let’s start with the bad news. David Lan has chosen to set the action in France in the 1940s. This means the show starts with accordions and berets, though mercifully without an onion-seller on a bicycle. Rosalind and Celia (Sienna Miller) exchange court news while sitting in the kind of cafe supposedly frequented by Jean-Paul Sartre. And, when the action moves to the country, we discover the banished Duke has gone into exile with a four-strong musical combo as if he were on leave from the Café de Paris rather than a political refugee.

Continue reading As You Like It at Wyndham’s Theatre – Review

As You Like It

As You Like It at Wyndhams Theatre – Review

On June 21, 2005October 25, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

As I like it

By Nicholas de Jongh | June 21, 2005 | The Evening Standard

I like to be nicely shocked at the theatre, and David Lan duly satisfies by giving As You Like It a sharp but appropriate Gallic make-over. Here in high heels, highish humour and a slinky, little black dress, comes Shakespeare’s wittiest heroine, Helen McCrory’s flirtatious Rosalind.

She is first seen sipping red wine with Sienna Miller’s bland, blonde Celia, in a Parisian café and, judging by the girls’ Hollywood hair, the post-war Forties. Lan has hit upon the brilliant notion of transporting Shakespeare’s sexually ambiguous comedy of love and misunderstanding to France and post-war Paris.

The notion fits like a sleek, fashionable glove. Shakespeare after all peppers the play with French place-names. The post-war Paris of Jean Paul Sartre, Simone Signoret and Edith Piaf revelled in an atmosphere of philosophical speculation, melancholia and bitter-sweet romantic songs.

As You Like It

Mad About The Girls

On June 15, 2005October 25, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Forget Juliet: Shakespeare’s real women are in ‘As You Like It’, as Sienna Miller and Helen McCrory will prove

Paul Taylor | June 15, 2005 | The Independent

Rosalind in As You Like It is the longest female part in Shakespeare, and once the character gets into the Forest of Arden and into male disguise, she acquires a freedom of emotional manoeuvre far greater than that of any of the other cross-dressed heroines in the canon. She has been called the “consciousness” of the comedy, a compliment that would never be paid to Viola in Twelfth Night, say, or Portia in The Merchant of Venice.

The androgynous focus of desire when in masculine mufti, she also offers the supreme instance in Shakespeare of the way that men should rely on the superior emotional intelligence of women. It’s a plum role but clearly also a daunting one. In the courtship game that Rosalind, in her alias of Ganymede, plays with Orlando, she has somehow to be up to her neck in the scenario she stage-manages and at a critically perceptive remove from it.

As You Like It Interviews Print Media

Shakespeare’s Sister Act

On June 7, 2005May 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

As You Like it with Sienna Miller and Helen McCrory

By Jasper Rees | June 7, 2005 | Daily Telegraph

Sienna Miller, Jude Law’s fiancée, is making her West End debut in ‘As You Like It’, a play she’s never seen. But it helps that she and co-star Helen McCrory have become close friends. They talk to Jasper Rees

‘The part of Celia is the most important role in As You Like It. Discuss.” This question will not crop up in any exam you may happen to be sitting, but it must cross the mind of directors.

Shakespearean comedy is full of twins sundered by accident or fate whose reunion the plot works towards, but As You Like It is the one comedy that portrays the daily event of sibling love. Rosalind and Celia may be only cousins, but “being ever from their cradles bred together”, they are “like Juno’s swans… coupled and inseparable”. Theirs is the best sister act in Shakespeare. So a production that offers a great Rosalind but an indifferent Celia gives with one hand but takes away with the other.

Continue reading Shakespeare’s Sister Act

Old Times Reviews

Old Times at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

On October 10, 2004May 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

A Sleek and Assured Revival

by Paul Taylor | October 10, 2004 | The Independent

It’s a fact seldom remarked on that the two women are never seen alone together in Harold Pinter’s 1971 three-hander Old Times. Why? Is it because an all-female conversation would blow the whole brilliant, artificial construction to bits? Would any private talk between them give the lie to the exaggeration in the play’s fundamental idea: that the past can be reinvented at will according to the needs of the present moment and that “memories” are merely weapons in a deadly battle over current contested territory?

The female characters interact with each other entirely under the eyes of Deeley, a film-maker who is forced into a duel over possession of his wife, Kate, when her old friend Anna, with whom she once shared a flat in London, visits them at their farmhouse near the sea. If the liberating twist is that Kate eventually sees off both claimants, the play uses the women as agents in a disturbing study of male insecurity, and of the savage operations of retrospective jealousy.

Continue reading Old Times at the Donmar Warehouse – Review