Terrence Rattigan Archives - Page 2 of 3

Helen McCrory: ‘This is a woman’s private space, invaded by others’

On July 9, 2020April 24, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Revisiting The Deep Blue Sea

by Chris Wiegand | The Guardian | July 9, 2020

As the National Theatre streams a bold revival of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, its star discusses a potent mix of sensuality and torment

‘It has a beautiful wisdom and simplicity’ ... Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea. — ‘It has a beautiful wisdom and simplicity’ … Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea. Photograph: Richard Hubert Smith/AP

Director Carrie Cracknell described one day in rehearsals with you as an “almost spiritual experience”. How would you define your collaborative relationship?

We first worked together on Medea in 2014. We took Ben Power’s new adaptation and delivered an all-singing, all-dancing production of a Greek tragedy set in the 20th century on to the massive Olivier stage in six weeks. So ours was a collaboration formed in the furnace. We worked together at breakneck speed. So when we came to work on The Deep Blue Sea, the task seemed much simpler.

I hope I speak for Carrie, too, when I say we now have an implicit trust and respect for each other. Carrie possesses a rare quality that all the best directors have: no ego. The best solution in the rehearsal room is used, she has no concern who it belongs to, just that the play is served. She encourages everyone to trust their instincts and never attempts to dominate but quietly edits, taking ideas and losing others. The Deep Blue Sea was one of the most profoundly happy experiences I have ever had in a rehearsal room. She has a gentleness and non-judgmental quality that make you feel you could do anything. I hope we have the opportunity to do it again.

Continue reading Helen McCrory: ‘This is a woman’s private space, invaded by others’

Interviews Print Media The Deep Blue Sea

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”).

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

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’

Print Media Reviews The Deep Blue Sea

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.

Interviews Print Media The Deep Blue Sea

5 minutes with Helen McCrory: ‘We’ve become too reverent with Rattigan’

On June 8, 2016April 27, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

The Deep Blue Sea actress discusses working with director Carrie Cracknell again and why they are taking an ‘unusual’ stance to Rattigan’s work

Emily Cole, June 8, 2016

I moved all around the world as a child because my father was in the foreign office. I used to do ballet quite seriously but stopped because we moved to east Africa and there wasn’t a ballet teacher there. When I moved to England I had a very influential teacher at my school – like most people who go into the job [acting] do. He was fantastic, he took us to see the theatre and spoke to us about it a lot. I then went off to study at the Drama Centre.

Richard Eyre saw me in a production when I was getting my Equity card and he gave me a lead on the main house at the National. He then went on to give me another seven leads over four years and really, that was my third training.

Helly [Helena Bonham Carter] and I used to spend hours looking at all the props, sets and costumes on Harry Potter. It was great fun because there were so many interesting people in it and we had so much time off, I mean, we spent a long time chatting to each other, and everybody in each department was extraordinary. It was a very happy shoot, it was great fun and David Yates [director] was lovely.

I think Rattigan is a brilliant writer and I feel if he were alive now, how frustrated he might be that everybody does his plays the same way. I’d seen Rattigan performed beautifully but often quite similarly and there seemed to be a house style that had been agreed. With The Deep Blue Sea, I was really interested to see if it was possible to play Hester in a slightly different way and actually approach it as you would for instance with a Shakespeare – you don’t necessarily get up in your doublet and hose and come on with your ruff. We’re very irreverent with the classics but suddenly we’ve become very reverent with Terence Rattigan so ours is a very irreverent production with quite an irreverent Hester. I think that you don’t give true justice as an artist unless you really try and reinvent productions each time you do them. I’m very nervous to see how it will be received because it’s unusual.

It’s really interesting working with Carrie [Cracknell] again because we worked in a very different way on Medea. Ben Power, who did the adaptation, was in the room as well as a chorus of 13 women and a choreographer. We also had Alison Goldfrapp writing the music. Carrie would spend a lot of time managing the production as well as trying to look at the script itself. We often disagreed quite vehemently about things but always got on very well and on this production, I think that that sort of shorthand honesty has led to a trust in the rehearsal room that has been very liberating. It’s a very calm rehearsal room actually and we work hard. There’s not a lot of sitting around talking about anecdotes and going out partying, it’s everybody arrives on the front foot and is ready for work and gets their head down. I find that really interesting and I’ve loved working with her again.

The Deep Blue Sea runs at the Lyttelton Theatre until 21 September.