Category: Theatre

Categories Interviews Print Media Uncle Vanya

Mendes’s Dream Team

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Helen McCrory talks to Jasper Rees about her roles in Sam Mendes’s valedictory double bill at the Donmar Warehouse

by Jasper Rees |

It’s only French actresses who will tell you in that detached, nonchalant way of theirs that, yes, they are beautiful. British actresses are more used to telling you that they’re not.

Take the following strident example. “I think I’m very lucky not to be beautiful,” says Helen McCrory. “I know more actors unhappy about being beautiful than the other way round. I find it really baffling, this modern obsession with people wanting to look good on screen or on stage. Why? Why?” She spits out the words. “I’m an actor, not a model.”

The oddity is that McCrory plays a lot of beautiful women. Yes, she took her first big lead in the television film Streetlife as an owl-eyed, bleach-blonde, child-murdering single mum on a Cardiff sink estate. But her square cheekbones and violently black eyes are better known to television viewers as the face of Anna Karenina, the most head-turning woman ever to hurl herself under a train in the pages of a classic novel.

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Categories Platonov Print Media Reviews

Platonov at the Almeida Theatre – Review

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Anton Chekhov in a new version by David Hare

by Philip Fisher | British Theatre Guide

“My life is in ruins and all you can do is joke about it”. This sums up the effect that Mikhail Platonov has on everybody that he encounters. There are four young women in this play and each of them falls desperately in love with the eponymous hero. After a brief spell of great happiness, suicidal disaster inevitably follows.

The set for David Hare’s new version is designed by Paul Brown to fit in the larger auditorium at the Almeida King’s Cross. It is one of the most impressive that can ever have been seen on a stage in England. In part, this is because the old railway sheds that make up the Almeida’s temporary home are so wide. It is possible to contain within the space a field of sunflowers, a wooden bungalow that also symbolically looks like a mausoleum, a garden, a stream which suddenly yields up a railroad track and the edge of a wood.

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Categories Platonov Print Media Reviews

Platonov at the Almeida – Review

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Helen McCrory Navigates a Full Spectrum of Emotion

By Matt Wolf | September 16, 2001 | Variety

“She’s an astonishing woman,” the terminally idle and self-loathing schoolmaster Platonov (Aidan Gillen) says of young widow Anna Petrovna (Helen McCrory), one of the many women buzzing about Platonov like moths drawn to a lethal and devouring flame. Coming nearly three hours into Jonathan Kent’s Almeida Theater premiere of David Hare’s fresh take on Chekhov’s once-abandoned and unruly play, Platonov’s assessment is equally applicable to the staging’s leading lady, McCrory, who navigates such a full spectrum of emotion that “astonishing” doesn’t seem to do her justice. (The actress’s previous legit credits include the London preem of “How I Learned to Drive.”)

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Platonov at The Almeida: Review

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Platonov

by Michael Billington | September 12, 2001 | The Guardian

What do you do with Chekhov’s unwieldy first play, written when he was just 21? In 1984 Michael Frayn brilliantly turned it into a much tidier Gogolian farce called Wild Honey. David Hare’s new version sticks closer to the original, acknowledges its inconsistencies, and yet still demonstrates why Chekhov is one of theatre’s great dramatists.

Chekhov does two extraordinary things in this early work. The first is to take a literary prototype, Don Juan, and recast him in Russian terms, so that he becomes a 27-year-old provincial schoolmaster, Platonov, who is “slightly married” but immensely attractive to other women, including a widowed landowner, her young stepdaughter and an earnest chemistry student. The Chekhovian irony is that Platonov is an essentially passive figure – the pursued rather than the pursuer, the superfluous man as sex object and, as he himself confesses, one of the living dead. Chekhov’s point is that only in a world of quack doctors, land-grabbing merchants and rapacious horse thieves would Platonov acquire such fatal attraction.

Categories Print Media Reviews Triumph of Love

The Triumph of Love at the Almeida – Review

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Helen McCrory is a Very Special Talent

Matt Wolf | September 6, 1999 | Variety

It takes a very special actress to burst the fey, densely plotted artifice that comes with the plays of Marivaux, but Helen McCrory is a very special talent indeed. Her amazing performance last year in “How I Learned to Drive” — a portrait of awakened sexuality both confident and fearful — transformed Paula Vogel’s play, and McCrory is scarcely less commanding amid the thicket of amorous intrigue that defines “The Triumph of Love.” Her surroundings on this occasion, however, aren’t nearly as happy as they were at the Donmar Warehouse last year, and even the staunchest of admirers may have trouble sitting through the (intermissionless) evening.

The problem is a production that is pitched somewhere between the Keystone Kops and “As You Like It” — McCrory and sidekick Tonia Chauvet would make a terrific Rosalind and Celia — of a play that is beloved by academics but is arid and even dull in performance, defying a decidedly eccentric supporting cast to bring it to tingling life.

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