Theatre Archives - Page 19 of 20

Les Enfants Du Paradis at the Barbican – Review

On February 11, 1996April 30, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

McCrory is throatily confident as Garance

by Matt Wolf | February 11, 1996 | Variety

Marcel Carne’s great 1945 film “Les Enfants du Paradis” is a hymn to actors, to the luxuriant power of art, and to France itself, whose spirit — the film was made during the German Occupation — remains as unvanquished as that of the simultaneously pervasive and elusive Garance, the courtesan who best embodies it. Simon Callow’s stage adaptation for the Royal Shakespeare Company is about a revolve, and a creaky one at that. Ten minutes in, and your heart sinks. Four hours later, you revolve out of the theater, dizzy and happy to get some air.

Robin Don’s calamitous turntable design is perhaps the most obvious failing of an enterprise that seems noble and foolish in equal measure. Callow is by no means the first to see in Jacques Prevert’s script the possibility of a stage epic, and what better troupe to attempt such a task than the RSC, which proved undaunted by heftier sources; Dickens and Hugo? In our time of abased emotion, why not restore to the theater the heightened sentiment that “Les Enfants” celebrates, folded into a narrative often compared to “Gone With the Wind”?

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Macbeth at Tricycle Theatre – Review

On October 31, 1995May 9, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

A Round Up of Reviews

by BBAShakespeare.co.uk | 1995

PRINCIPAL CAST: Tom Chadbon (Duncan); Ewen Cummins (Banquo); Lennie James (Macbeth); John Keegan (Macduff); Helen McCrory (Lady Macbeth).

This production ran from 20 October – 18 November 1995.

“Nicholas Kent’s production of a play that could hardly be better suited to the Tricycle’s intimate auditorium is pacy and racy but patchily acted….Christine Marfleet’s set of curved, beaten metal panels that gleam in the firelight suggest both the distant path but also some future state, and a canny use of percussion adds to the atmosphere….But too many of the actors are ill at ease with the verse. Not so Helen McCrory’s Lady Macbeth, whose performance is in a different league to the rest – passionate, focused and artfully spoken. A great classical career beckons.” ~ Lyn Gardner, The Guardian, 1 November 1995

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Devil's Disciple Print Media Reviews

The Devil’s Disciple at the National Theatre – Review

On September 12, 1994May 8, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

A Roisterous production of Bernard Shaw’s 1899 Melodrama

by Matt Wolf | September 12, 1994 | Variety

The National marks time pleasantly with a roisterous production of Shaw’s 1899 melodrama and at least restores to the Olivier stage some of the energy missing from it of late. If the play hardly seems worth such a fuss, it’s only because Shaw is relatively rarely done at this address; one yearns to see the same theater take on, say, “Man and Superman.”

Still, as directed with brio by Christopher Morahan against John Gunter’s scenic backdrop of a map of Revolutionary War New England, “Devil’s Disciple” will be a crowd pleaser. There’s no harm in that, particularly with as winning a central trio of performers as Richard Bonneville (Dick Dudgeon), Paul Jesson (Anthony Anderson) and Helen McCrory (his wife, Judith), all of whom barnstorm their way through a play that has not an ounce of depth or subtlety to it. The “devil’s disciple” of the title, Dudgeon is the family black sheep led mistakenly to the gallows in 1777 New Hampshire in place of the town pastor, Anderson.

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Print Media Reviews The Seagull

The Seagull at the National Theatre – Review

On July 9, 1994May 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

It is the women who dominate this show

By Irving Wardle | July 9 ,1994 | The independent

Besides allowing Dame Judi Dench to add another trophy to her collection of Chekhov leads, John Caird’s production of The Seagull has the pretext of restoring a picture frame to the open stage; or, rather, four picture frames, which descend one by one on John Gunter’s lakeside perspective, so that by the end you are looking through the accumulated settings of the whole play. The apparent aim of this romantically cumbersome design, supported by Dominic Muldowney’s wistful valses oubliees, is to break the embargo on Chekhovian ‘atmosphere’. The effect is contradicted once the opening image of the ghostly company drifting under moonlit birch trees gives way to the play itself, performed with full egoistic drive in a colloquially muscular version by Pam Gems.

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Print Media Reviews The Seagull

The Seagull at the National Theatre – Review

On July 3, 1994May 12, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

How does director John Caird avoid predictable performances?

by Clara Bayley | July 3, 1994 | The Independent

When actors portray actors, or worse, actors acting, it can become an excuse for over-the-top self-indulgence. Chekhov’s The Seagull, which is previewing now at the National, features both the celebrated actress Arkadina (played by Judi Dench, right) and the youthful aspirant Nina, performing in Konstantin’s experimental play. How does director John Caird avoid predictable performances?

‘That can be true of any ill-considered portrayal of a theatrical or of any kind of character,’ he points out. ‘You might cast someone who is 75 years old to play an old person, and they start playing old. You have to tell them to play young then.’

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