That rare performer who can simultaneously play intelligence and desire, a woman at once on the prowl and gently pained, McCrory turns out to be the Harold Pinter interpreter of one’s dreams.
by Matt Wolf | July 18, 2004 | Variety
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Alastair Muir/Shutterstock (510620hd)
‘Old Times’ play at The Donmar Warehouse – Helen McCrory (Anna)
VARIOUS
It takes a real gift to make the mere question “Do you?” at once sexy, funny and mysterious, but it long ago became clear that Helen McCrory is no mere actress. That rare performer who can simultaneously play intelligence and desire, a woman at once on the prowl and gently pained, McCrory turns out to be the Harold Pinter interpreter of one’s dreams. Those same qualities were on show, triumphantly, in the Donmar’s “How I Learned to Drive” and in McCrory’s Yelena two years ago in “Uncle Vanya,” directed by Sam Mendes. And they prove crucial to a play like Pinter’s 1971 “Old Times,” which turns on issues of absence, abandonment and loss, and whether a supremely malleable drama’s two female characters might in fact be one.
On the other hand, “in fact” isn’t a phrase readily applied to a text whose ellipses shift from production to production, along with a sense of where its erotic pivot lies. In the last London “Old Times,” on the West End in 1995, Julie Christie brought a sphinx like command to the crucial role of Kate, the wife who is being fought over by her filmmaker husband, Deeley, and her best friend from 20 years before, Anna.
