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Helen McCrory at BBC Press Office: Messiah IV – The Harrowing

On August 18, 2005May 7, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory as Rachel Price

by BBC Press Office | August 18, 2005

When preparing for her role as Messiah’s new Chief Pathologist, Rachel Price, Helen McCrory drew a line at attending a real autopsy despite being offered the opportunity.

“I walked into make-up one day for tests and opened a pathology book, literally took one look and shut it straight away. I just couldn’t bear to look at it any more.

“It wasn’t so much that I am squeamish – although I am – it was more to do with the fact that these are people who are someone’s daughter, mother, brother and that was the main difference between the character and myself,” she says.

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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.

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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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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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Old Times Print Media Reviews

Old Times at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

On July 8, 2004May 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

A Masterpiece Has Found The Production It Deserves

by Charles Spencer | July 8, 2004 | Daily Telegraph

OLD TIMES by Pinter ;Helen McCrory as Anna ;
Credit: Ivan Kyncl / ArenaPAL ;
www.arenapal.com

So many of Pinter’s plays inhabit a predominantly masculine world, in which one chap is always trying to get one over another. The rooms in which his dramas are set become battlegrounds – for territory, possession and control.

But in what for me are undoubtedly his greatest dramas, women emphatically make their presence felt, too. You only have to think of Betrayal, The Homecoming and of course, this piece, Old Times (1971), to realise what a master Pinter is at conveying the thrill, the mystery and the destructive force of desire.

His work can be viewed as a series of illustrations of various forms of bullying and intimidation, whether at a personal or a political level, and these persistent motifs are certainly present in Old Times. But so too is a seam of dangerous, provocative sexuality and a fascinating analysis of memory – its almost hallucinatory clarity, its possible unreliability and the devious uses to which it can be put.

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