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How Helen McCrory Shone, Even in a Haze of Mystery

On April 17, 2021April 19, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

She Was Unforgettable Onstage Playing Seemingly Serene Women Who Rippled With Restlessness

by Ben Brantley | The New York Times | April 17, 2021

Helen McCrory in the National Theater revival of Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea.” Credit: Richard Hubert Smith

Selfishly, my first feelings on hearing that the uncanny British actress Helen McCrory had died at 52 were of personal betrayal. We were supposed to have shared a long and fruitful future together, she and I. There’d be me on one side of the footlights and her on the other, as she unpacked the secrets of the human heart with a grace and ruthlessness shared by only a few theater performers in each generation.

I never met her, but I knew her — or rather I knew the women she embodied with an intimacy that sometimes seemed like a cruel violation of privacy. When London’s theaters reawakened from their pandemic lockdown, she was supposed to be waiting for me with yet another complete embodiment of a self-surprising life.

Ms. McCrory had become world famous for dark and exotic roles onscreen, as the fiercely patrician witch Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies and the terrifying criminal matriarch Polly Gray in the BBC series “Peaky Blinders.” But for me, she was, above all, a bright creature of the stage and in herself a reason to make a theater trip to London.

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Helen McCrory would have been the next Helen Mirren or Judi Dench

On April 16, 2021May 14, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

The actress leaves an extraordinary body of work, but there is no doubt that she had so much more to give

The wonder for me about Helen McCrory – whose passing, at 52, is so cruel, so sad, such a profound and premature loss to the acting profession – is how relatively long it took for people to cotton on to her magnificence.

I was lucky enough to visit the Tricycle, north London one winter evening in 1995 and see her star as Lady M in Macbeth. In fact, of course, she wasn’t then the “draw” – here was, surprisingly enough, a Shakespeare production at a major off-West End venue renowned for its contemporary political work. It was an oddity from artistic director Nicolas Kent. Yet within the space of a couple of hours, I emerged with her name on my lips, and the surest conviction that I had set eyes on one of the greats.

Here was an actress who was so intense, so spellbinding, so caught up in every moment of every scene she was in that it was as though she carried a lifetime’s acting experience within her: but she was just in her mid-20s. Her flintiness illuminated every line it sparked off. Rapt, I ended my review of that dark, sinister torch-lit night, referencing the sleepwalking scene, saying that “it is the sight of McCrory alone, scurrying restlessly round in the dark and hugging a single flame, that burns a lasting image of unstoppable evil onto your retina.”

Print Media Reviews The Late Middle Classes

The Late Middle Classes at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

On October 23, 2011May 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory is both devilish and divine

by Michael Coveney | October 23, 2011 | The Independent

The late Harold Pinter, who first directed the late Simon Gray’s The Late Middle Classes, found it to be a rich and beautifully wrought piece of work that was “deeply satisfying” to direct. I see what he means but I do not share his certainty.

That production, which I saw at the Watford Palace, never made the West End. That led to some grumpy protestations, not least from Pinter. So it’s good to see the Donmar reviving the piece, even if David Leveaux’s production doesn’t prove any more persuasive.

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Print Media Reviews The Late Middle Classes

The Late Middle Classes at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

On June 2, 2010May 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

The Late Middle Classes is Simon Gray at the very top of his game

By Charles Spencer | June 2, 2010 | The Telegraph

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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Reviews The Late Middle Classes

Review: The Late Middle Classes

On June 1, 2010April 15, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

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.