Almeida Theatre Archives

Helen and Damian Attend the Play ‘The Hunt’

On July 17, 2019April 25, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

An Evening at the Theatre

by Gingersnap | damian-lewis.com | July 17, 2019

Pictured with Abbiegail. Photo source: Twitter @alanj555

Both Damian and Helen attended a star-studded night at The Hunt playing at the Almeida Theatre in London on Wednesday, July 17, 2019. The play is described as:

“We are a small community. The happiness of our children is everything. Our hopes and dreams rest in these tiny souls. In a small town in northern Denmark, the children celebrate Harvest Festival. In the forest by the water the men of the lodge stand naked in the cold. This is their country. This is their song. In the shadows a lonely child gives a strange man her heart. The hunt begins.”

The play runs until August 3, 2019. For ticket information, click here.

Audio Interviews Rosmersholm

BBC 4 Radio Woman’s Hour: Helen McCrory Talks About Rosmersholm

On May 30, 2008May 27, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

As Rebecca West in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm

BBC 4 Radio Woman’s Hour | May 30, 2008

The actress Helen McCrory has been acclaimed for her talent and her range: as one journalist put it, “not many actresses can say that they have played Cherie Blair, Lady Macbeth and Anna Karenina”. She is now in the Ibsen play “Rosmersholm” at the Almeida Theatre in London. The play is not the best known of Ibsen’s work and is the story of Rosmer, a former pastor and pillar of society, whose wife has committed suicide. Her companion, Rebecca West, has stayed at Rosmersholm and she and Rosmer become inspired by radical idealism. Helen McCrory joins Sheila to talk about the role and her life.

Listen here.

Rosmersholm is at the Almeida Theatre in London until 5th July

Damian Lewis Five Gold Rings Print Media Reviews

Five Gold Rings at the Almeida – Review

On January 4, 2004May 8, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Joanna Laurens’ “Five Gold Rings” has loftier things in mind than the mere settling of domestic scores

by Matt Wolf | January 4, 2004 | Variety

Not every dysfunctional family drama contains lines like, “It is art to fly speech in the air,” but Joanna Laurens’ Almeida Theater entry “Five Gold Rings” has loftier things in mind than the mere settling of domestic scores. In her sophomore play following her much-praised debut effort “The Three Birds” (which I missed), Laurens wants to reinvent the discourse in such plays, trading in a time-worn naturalism for a heightened language that less charitably inclined playgoers likely will find wearing.

That the evening possesses the considerable fascination it does honors both director Michael Attenborough, in his second consecutive play at this address as Almeida a.d. (following Neil LaBute’s “The Mercy Seat”), and a blue-chip cast of British theater veterans (David Calder) and ascending younger talents (Damian Lewis, Helen McCrory), all of whom are in top form. Sure, “Five Gold Rings” may sound at times as if it has been translated from Latin, but it’s unlikely to encounter more gifted interpreters.

Continue reading Five Gold Rings at the Almeida – Review

Damian Lewis Five Gold Rings Print Media Reviews

Five Gold Rings at the Almeida – Review

On December 19, 2003May 8, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Five Gold Rings

by Michael Billington | December 19, 2003 | The Guardian

I feel sorry for Joanna Laurens. Having been praised for the poetic inventiveness of her first play, The Three Birds, I suspect she will take a lot of flak for writing a non-naturalistic family drama. Yet, since we sanction all kinds of wild physical theatre, it seems only right that we should find room for linguistic experiment.

Laurens’s play sounds like a conventionally unhappy family reunion. Henry, a penniless patriarch living in a mysterious desert, is attended at Christmas by his two sons and their wives. But both marriages are in trouble; and when the supposedly impotent Daniel is attracted to his childless sister-in-law, Miranda, the skeletons come tumbling out of the family cupboard. Daniel’s plan to flee with Miranda is unwittingly financed by his brother, Simon, which leads to revelations of revenge, rape and incest.

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Platonov Print Media Reviews

Platonov at the Almeida Theatre – Review

On September 20, 2001May 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Anton Chekhov in a new version by David Hare

by Philip Fisher | British Theatre Guide

“My life is in ruins and all you can do is joke about it”. This sums up the effect that Mikhail Platonov has on everybody that he encounters. There are four young women in this play and each of them falls desperately in love with the eponymous hero. After a brief spell of great happiness, suicidal disaster inevitably follows.

The set for David Hare’s new version is designed by Paul Brown to fit in the larger auditorium at the Almeida King’s Cross. It is one of the most impressive that can ever have been seen on a stage in England. In part, this is because the old railway sheds that make up the Almeida’s temporary home are so wide. It is possible to contain within the space a field of sunflowers, a wooden bungalow that also symbolically looks like a mausoleum, a garden, a stream which suddenly yields up a railroad track and the edge of a wood.

Continue reading Platonov at the Almeida Theatre – Review