Medea with Helen McCrory
by National Theatre | YouTube | July 22, 2014
Categories A Little Chaos Bill Interviews Penny Dreadful Personal and Family Life Print Media The Woman in Black, Angel of Death
Helen McCrory Interview: Woman & Home
The Real Me
by Victoria Young | Woman & Home | Autumn, 2014
Helen McCrory talks to Victoria Young about feminism, marriage to a sex symbol – and being a gypsy at heart.
Actress Helen McCrory, 46, has played everyone from Medea to Cherie Blair as well as Polly Gray in Peaky Blinders. She’s married to actor Damian Lewis. They live in London and have two children, Manon, eight, and Gulliver, seven.
I grew up in Africa because my father was a diplomat. So I was lucky enough to grow up in a world without advertising. As a result, I’ve never judged myself on what I was supposed to look like. It’s good and bad. When it came to filming the second series of Peaky Blinders, I decided “I want Polly to look rougher, she should look haggard, life beaten, absolutely exhausted.” I then saw the first episode and remembered the adage, “Be careful what you wish for.”
Categories Interviews Medea Print Media
Helen McCrory: A Drama Queen Slays Them with Her Greek Turn
As a child she sliced a beehive in half with a machete; now the feisty actress is wowing theatre-goers with her gory portrayal of the murderous matriarch Medea
04 April 2011 – Helen McCrory attends the grand opening of Harry Potter: The Exhibition on April 4, 2011, at the Discovery Times Square Exposition Center, in New York, NY.
Tickets for Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet may have sold out in record time last week, but Helen McCrory’s Medea is the theatrical event of the moment. Avid theatre-goers who take in both may find the Shakespeare a little pale after McCrory’s “stunning” performance in Euripides’s blood-soaked tale of a woman who wreaks revenge on her faithless husband by killing their children. “It’s the reverse of Hamlet because he spends three hours worrying and does nothing, whereas Medea takes an hour and 15, massacres the whole f****** stage and walks off,” McCrory said before the production opened. “But it’s great because she uses every shred of femininity that she has to do it and she also has the complexity of guilt.”
McCrory added that Medea was “one of the greatest parts you’ll ever play” and the critics seem united in lauding this as her own best performance. Maxie Szalwinska, theatre reviewer for The Sunday Times, said McCrory “ascends to greatness” in the classical role. “She’s one of those actors you can sense has a great performance in them if a director can unlock it. This is McCrory’s,” Szalwinska said.
Continue reading Helen McCrory: A Drama Queen Slays Them with Her Greek Turn
Categories Personal and Family Life Print Media
What I see in the Mirror: Helen McCrory
My eyes are large, with dark circles – as the Spanish say, “God put her eyes in with a sooty thumb”‘
Rosanna Greenstreet | August 2, 2014 | The Guardian
My hair is wild, Janis Joplin crossed with Jimi Hendrix. There’s a nice man – Matthew – in Percy Street who tames it for me. But if there’s no time, I’ll happily pop on a wig or hat or, if it’s not too hot, both.
My eyes are large, with dark circles – as the Spanish say, “God put her eyes in with a sooty thumb.” Teeth, nondescript. Lips, full – less so now, which allows me to wear red lipstick without looking like a sex worker.
I’m small, but have always thought of myself as tall. I stand straight, with one of my two children welded to each hip. I am strong – years of ballet as a child have assured that my legs would not look out of place in a football squad lineup.
I’m a mixture of my father and my mother inside and out – Welsh and Scottish with a dash of English.
My best feature is my smile, and I suppose it will remain my best feature for ever. After all, a happy, toothless, withered old crone smiling at you is better than a grumpy, toothless, withered old crone snarling at you.
Medea Review – Clenched and Forceful
Helen McCrory delivers a majestic performance as the vengeful protagonist in Ben Power’s new version of Euripides’ play
Susannah Clap | July 26, 2014 | The Guardian
We are living in an age of astonishing female actors. Of course, the great pity is that audiences rarely have the chance to see any of those over 60, though Eileen Atkins is – hurrah – appearing at Stratford this autumn. Meanwhile, younger generations are in mighty form this week.
Helen McCrory is at the peak of her power. She is a marvelous Medea. When she first enters in combat trousers, scrubbing at her teeth as if they were enemies, her voice is deep and guttural. Each syllable seems to have been wrenched from her insides. She goes up a register and tightens her delivery once she has fixed on her terrible plan: to revenge her husband by killing her children. It is as if she is relieved to have reached the moment of greatest desperation.
McCrory has always been a gracefully physical actor, whether sauntering in white lace towards the samovar in Uncle Vanya or jagged with boredom in Simon Gray’s The Late Middle Classes. She is fluent in different kinds of movement here, too: wild as she squats to haul things up from an underworld source, slinky and knowing as she meets her ex-husband in a surprising kiss, defiant as she squares up to the world with her plans. Yet it is the range of her voice that is so extraordinary, and that lets you into the centre of her despair. There is, after all, no surer symptom of depression than vocal flatness.
McCrory manages to suggest that her murders are a way of hurting herself. Yet she does not go all the way down this fashionable path. She may be a victim, but she is also a shaman. Elsewhere, Carrie Cracknell’s production quakes with female rage and powerlessness. Tom Scutt’s revealing design sets a fairytale wild wood, bristling with twisted branches, at the back of the stage. A chorus in Horrocks frocks is lined up above the action like bridesmaids. As these women question Medea’s account of herself, they begin to twitch and to jerk like mannequins moved by an unseen hand. This is rather too modishly influenced by the dance of Pina Bausch, yet it adds one more tremor of malaise. When Medea sends her husband’s new wife a dress drenched in poison, the young woman appears behind a transparent screen performing a dance of death, as if trying to pull herself out of her own lethal skin.
Ben Power’s new version is clenched and forceful. It does not have the brave beauty of Robin Robertson’s 2008 translation, in which the gods “turn the bright air black”. It does have power: its short lines are like splinters.