National Theatre Archives - Page 5 of 9

Helen McCrory: ‘A good playwright works you like an athlete’

On April 10, 2020April 13, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

The actor talks about her part in launching #FeedNHS — and her role in Terence Rattigan’s ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, now streamed by the National Theatre

by Sarah Hamming | Financial Times | July 10, 2020

It’s hard to write about what Helen McCrory got up to during lockdown. Not because it was bad. Quite the reverse, in fact. In March, she and her fellow-actor husband Damian Lewis launched #FeedNHS, a scheme to provide food to front-line workers. By the height of the pandemic, it was serving 45,000 meals daily to 115 hospitals across the country.

No, the trouble is that any write-up that makes this sound remotely saintly would drive her bananas. Frank, funny and down to earth, McCrory, 51, has a fierce aversion to anything pretentious (this is a woman who, on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, chose the complete works of Spike Milligan as her luxury book, wrapped in a Bertrand Russell dust jacket “just in case anybody sees me, from another island”).

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Audio Books Poetry Readings

Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year

On September 16, 2019April 12, 2021 By Gingersnap4Helen No Comments

Helen and Damian Lead Shakespeare Reading

by Gingersnap4Helen | helen-mccrory.com | September 16, 2019

We are delighted to announce that Damian and Helen will be joining Allie Esiri’s new compilation Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year‘s recorded audio book. It is a journey through a calendar year, highlighting key moments and dates with a sonnet, speech or scene taken from across all of Shakespeare’s works.

According to Pan Macmillan Publishers website, Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year will be published on September 19, 2019, along with an audio book. Fans can purchase the audio book to hear the couple recite one of Shakespeare’s works!

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Poetry Readings Video

A Poem for Every Day of the Year

On November 11, 2017April 12, 2021 By Gingersnap4Helen No Comments

Refugee Blues

by Tristram Fane Saunders | The Telegraph | November 11, 2017

Afterparty Damian Lewis, Allie Esiri and Helen McCrory. Source: Twitter @AllieEsiri

Our fave actor was present at the November 10 reading of Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter as part of the unusually glitzy Olivier Theatre audience at the National Theatre launch of well-connected editor Allie Esiri’s new anthology A Poem for Every Day of the Year.

Helen McCrory and Howards End star Samuel West kept things sharp and understated to great effect.

The book is aimed squarely at young readers, but last night’s crowd seemed to contain fewer children than celebrities. Each arrival prompted a chorus of whispers.

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Interviews Print Media The Deep Blue Sea

‘Heart in her mouth’: Helen McCrory brings compassion to a tragic role in The Deep Blue Sea

On September 29, 2016April 12, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Helen McCrory’s Hester in The Deep Blue Sea

Peter Craven | September 29, 2016 | Sydney Morning Herald

Helen McCrory is at 48 one of the big-time actresses of the British stage, a classical actor who can burn up the stage in modern roles as well. You might have seen her as Cherie Blair with Helen Mirren in The Queen or as Narcissa Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, or on TV in Peaky Blinders.

In 2005 I saw her in the West End in what is arguably Shakespeare’s greatest comic role for a woman, Rosalind in As You Like It to Dominic West’s Orlando. McCrory’s voice was deep velvet and her wit razor sharp, a Rosalind for the ages.

National Theatre live broadcasts have shown her in The Last of the Haussmans with Julie Walters, and as a riveting Medea. Now she’s doing a modern classic, Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea.

“I worked with [Harold] Pinter on Old Times and when I asked him who his favourite modern playwright was he said Rattigan,” McCrory says. “How bizarre, I thought – how deeply bizarre. Surely they couldn’t be further apart in content and style?” Pinter with his menacing pauses, his uncanny ear for dark implications.

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Reviews The Deep Blue Sea

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.

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