Back at Hogwarts
by IGN | You Tube | June 30, 2010
Categories Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Trailer Video
Categories Print Media Reviews The Late Middle Classes
The Late Middle Classes at the Donmar Warehouse – Review
The Late Middle Classes is Simon Gray at the very top of his game
Finally, 11 years after its premiere, and almost two years after the dramatist’s death, Simon Gray’s The Late Middle Classes has made it into London.
This rich, haunting play, mostly set in the early Fifties on Hayling Island and with a period flavour so strong that you can almost taste the powdered egg, was bumped out of the West End last time around by a dire musical.
In a way, you can see why those who blocked the play’s transfer back in 1999 were nervous.
There is a rare subtlety, and ambiguity about the piece, a mixture of comedy combined with something far darker that resists easy explanation or analysis.
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Review: The Late Middle Classes
Smooth Operator… Helen McCrory in The Late Middle Classes
by Michael Billington | June 1, 2010 | The Guardian
Justice has finally been done. This Simon Gray play expired on the road in 1999 without ever making it to the West End. Now, in David Leveaux’s sensitive revival, it emerges as one of Gray’s best plays: a quietly moving portrait of repressive 1950s England and, in particular, of the way children often become the victim of adult dreams and desires.
The action is bookended by two present-day scenes in which the mature Holly visits his former music teacher. But the bulk of the story takes place on Hayling Island in the 1950s where the 12-year-old Holly is caught between conflicting emotional needs.
Categories Interviews Print Media The Late Middle Classes
Helen McCrory: ‘Attack yourself – don’t get lazy’
Why Helen Loves Acting
by Maddy Costa | The Guardian | June 1, 2010
She’s played Cherie Blair, a Harry Potter villain and now a 1950s housewife. Helen McCrory tells Maddy Costa why she loves acting. Directors go out of their way to work with Helen McCrory. Pregnancy twice scuppered her plans to star as the passionate idealist Rebecca West in a London revival of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm – but rather than cast somebody else, its director, Anthony Page, kept rescheduling the production around her. Pregnancy also lost her the role of Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, so its director, David Yates, saved the part of the equally wicked Narcissa Malfoy in the next three Potter films for her.
Now it’s the turn of David Leveaux, who, after several thwarted attempts to find a suitable joint project, has pinned her down to appear in Simon Gray’s play The Late Middle Classes, at London’s Donmar Warehouse. Add the fact that critics invariably praise her performances as luminous, vibrant, compelling and seductive, and it would be enough to make any actor complacent. Not McCrory. For her, it’s vital “to attack yourself, so you don’t become lazy”. Continue reading Helen McCrory: ‘Attack yourself – don’t get lazy’
Categories Print Media Reviews The Special Relationship
The Special Relationship on HBO – Review
Through Thick and Thin?
Bill and Hillary Clinton may take comfort in the flattering portrait of their marriage offered by a new HBO movie by Peter Morgan on Saturday night. But unfortunately for former President Clinton, the film’s title, “The Special Relationship,” refers to his partnership not with his wife but with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister.
That alliance began as a bro-mance in the 1990s: two like-minded baby boomers leading a center-left political movement they called the “third way.” It fizzled at century’s end like a broken marriage, in bitterness and mistrust.