helenistic, Author at Helen McCrory

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.

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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.

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Old Times Reviews

Old Times at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

On July 18, 2004May 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

That rare performer who can simultaneously play intelligence and desire, a woman at once on the prowl and gently pained, McCrory turns out to be the Harold Pinter interpreter of one’s dreams.

by Matt Wolf | July 18, 2004 | Variety

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Alastair Muir/Shutterstock (510620hd)
‘Old Times’ play at The Donmar Warehouse – Helen McCrory (Anna)
VARIOUS

It takes a real gift to make the mere question “Do you?” at once sexy, funny and mysterious, but it long ago became clear that Helen McCrory is no mere actress. That rare performer who can simultaneously play intelligence and desire, a woman at once on the prowl and gently pained, McCrory turns out to be the Harold Pinter interpreter of one’s dreams. Those same qualities were on show, triumphantly, in the Donmar’s “How I Learned to Drive” and in McCrory’s Yelena two years ago in “Uncle Vanya,” directed by Sam Mendes. And they prove crucial to a play like Pinter’s 1971 “Old Times,” which turns on issues of absence, abandonment and loss, and whether a supremely malleable drama’s two female characters might in fact be one.

On the other hand, “in fact” isn’t a phrase readily applied to a text whose ellipses shift from production to production, along with a sense of where its erotic pivot lies. In the last London “Old Times,” on the West End in 1995, Julie Christie brought a sphinx like command to the crucial role of Kate, the wife who is being fought over by her filmmaker husband, Deeley, and her best friend from 20 years before, Anna.

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Interviews Old Times Print Media

Old Times at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

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

Helen McCrory: Memories are made of these

by Sam Marlowe | July 10, 2004 | The Independent

In an old interview with Helen McCrory, there’s an eye-catching account of her first day at a rough Bletchley school. The story goes that the young Helen was sent home in disgrace after defending herself from a skinhead schoolboy thug (who threatened her with a knife) by breaking his arm. Sitting opposite the delicate, dark-eyed heroine of this tale, I try to picture the scene, and I have to ask: is it true? “Did you read it in a paper? Then what do you think?” replies the actress with a throaty laugh. “No, of course it’s not true. It was me being rather sarcastic. I’ve soooo learnt that irony does not read well in print.”

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