Carrie Cracknell Archives

The Deep Blue Sea – Lyttelton, National Theatre, Review: ‘McCrory gives a commanding portrayal of a woman exhausted by unreciprocated desire’

On June 9, 2016April 28, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

After winning awards for their collaboration on Medea, Helen McCrory and director Carrie Cracknell resume their partnership in this revival of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 masterpiece

by Paul Taylor | June 9, 2016 | The Independent

Helen McCrory gives a commanding performance in this revival of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play

(Richard Hubert Smith)

Helen McCrory and director Carrie Cracknell won awards for their striking collaboration on Medea. They resume their partnership, with more mixed results, in this revival of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 masterpiece.

You need an actress with the range to tackle the tragic extremities of Euripides and Racine if you seek to sound the depths of Hester Collyer, one of the great female roles of the postwar repertoire. The play may unfold in a dingy Ladbroke Grove rooming house, but it focuses on a woman who is a Fifties equivalent of Phedre, flouting convention in her obsessive infatuation with a man who cannot match the intensity of her feelings. One-sided passion, unequal love: it’s Rattigan’s abiding theme, explored here with matchless insight in a play that was inspired by the suicide of one of the playwright’s former male lovers.

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The Deep Blue Sea: Helen McCrory achingly good as woman adrif

On June 9, 2016May 1, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

McCrory delivers one of the performances of the year

by Henry Hitchings | June 9, 2016 | Evening Standard

Smoke signals: Helen McCrory / Richard Hubert Smith

Her character Hester Collyer is besotted with a man who is incapable of reciprocating her seriousness. When we first see her she’s flat out in front of an unlit gas fire, having failed to kill herself. Throughout the two and a half hours that follow, we suspect another suicide attempt is imminent.

Her lover Freddie is a drunk whose distinguished career in the RAF has given way to a diet of golf and sketchy business meetings. Tom Burke captures the caddish manner of a fallen idol who has slumped into emotional and professional laziness. He’s cruelly insensitive — but retains a faint hint of likeability that makes his callousness feel especially sad.

Medea Print Media Reviews

Medea review – Carrie Cracknell’s version is a tragic force to be reckoned wit

On July 22, 2014April 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory excels in this modern-dress take on Euripides that is alive with complexity and psychological astuteness

After her success with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Carrie Cracknell now turns her directorial attention to an even more wronged heroine: Euripides‘ Medea, who avenges herself on Jason by murdering their two children. The virtue of this production and Ben Power’s new version is that they avoid quasi-operatic grandeur to present us with a recognisable human being who is alive with contradictions.

You sense this from the start in Helen McCrory‘s stunning modern-dress Medea. We first hear her offstage howls at Jason’s abandonment of her so that he can marry a Corinthian princess. Our first sighting of McCrory, however, is of a woman in singlet and dungarees emerging from her closet, cleaning her teeth. The complex portrait that emerges is of a Medea who is both rational and irrational, in the grip of a vengeful idée fixe and yet open to maternal feeling.

“My heart is wrenched in two,” McCrory announces at one point; and throughout, her Medea switches, with brilliant volatility, from the manipulative to the murderous to the unpredictably humane.

Continue reading Medea review – Carrie Cracknell’s version is a tragic force to be reckoned wit