Categories Reviews The Late Middle Classes

Review: The Late Middle Classes

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Smooth Operator… Helen McCrory in The Late Middle Classes

by Michael Billington | June 1, 2010 | The Guardian
Helen McCrory in The Late Middle Classes at the Donmar Warehouse
                                       Photograph: Johan Persson

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.

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Categories Interviews Print Media The Late Middle Classes

Helen McCrory: ‘Attack yourself – don’t get lazy’

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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

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by Alessandra Stanley | May 27, 2010 | New York Times

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.

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Categories Interviews Print Media The Late Middle Classes

Time and Place: Helen McCrory

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The stage actress, 41, who played Cherie Blair in the film The Queen, recalls an idyllic childhood among snakes and sea urchins in Tanzania

by Caroline Rees | May 16, 2010 | The Sunday Times

Between the ages of six and nine, in the mid-1970s, I lived at 86 Haile Selassie Road in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. My father worked for the Foreign Office, and was posted there from Cameroon, which is practically 100% humidity, so we arrived mouldy with boils into the dry heat, which was beautiful.

The house was two storeys, painted white, with a horseshoe gravel drive. We never went into the right side of the garden: that was where the army ants lived. On the left were trees that we climbed; my father built a castle out of boxes and sprayed it silver.

A monitor lizard lived in the back garden; we’d lie on the ground and look at its eyes. We had monkeys at the front and love birds in the roof, which hopped all over the lawn in the morning.

Joseph, our cook, lived in a compound at the back with Bahari, his son. Bahari was a fantastic football player because he walked with a hobbled gait, which meant that, when he was dribbling, you never knew which way he would go. I loved sports, so Bahari and I played football all day. Apende, our ayah [nanny], seemed 1,000 years old, but my God she could move. One day, there was a snake in the kitchen. She ran in and whacked the shit out of it. My mum said: “Is it poisonous?” Apende said: “We kill first, ask later.”

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