An Explosive Energy: Sam Mendes Pays Tribute to Helen McCrory

On April 18, 2021April 19, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Whether Acting in Chekhov on Stage or a Bond film, the Star – Who Has Died Aged 52 – Was Incredibly Exciting to Watch, Remembers the Skyfall Director

by Sam Mendes | The Guardian | April 18, 2021

When I was directing Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night as my final productions as artistic director of the Donmar in 2002, I asked Helen to play the role of Sonya in Uncle Vanya. Word came back that she would love to have a chat about it. She strode into my office, sat on the sofa and immediately told me I had it all wrong. She told me she should be playing Yelena – the other young female role – and then proceeded to spend the next hour telling me exactly why. She left the room with the part. This has never happened to me before or since. All I can say by way of explanation is that it just felt inevitable. She was clearly already half way to giving a superb performance, I simply had to get out of the way and let her complete the job. Which, of course, she did – with utter brilliance.

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Tributes

Helen McCrory: An extraordinarily eloquent actor who understood the power of silence like few others

On April 17, 2021April 28, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

McCrory brought the same electrifying presence to mainstream TV roles and acclaimed stage work,

by Claire Allfree | April 17, 2021 | The Independent

Helen McCrory had an extraordinarily eloquent face, but her most expressive features, by some distance, were her eyebrows. She had an uncanny ability to raise them just so, in ways that could suddenly chill the air. In one of her final acting appearances, she used them in the concluding episode of ITV’s Quiz, playing a QC defending the coughing Major Ingram and his wife. Her gimlet-eyed performance was so icily forensic that she briefly became a Twitter sensation.

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Medea Print Media The Deep Blue Sea Tributes Uncle Vanya

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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Reviews

Review: Uncle Vanya

On September 18, 2002April 16, 2021 By helenistic No Comments

Uncle Vanya

by Michael Billington | Sep 18, 2002 | The Guardian

I have measured out my life in Uncle Vanyas from Olivier’s legendary Chichester production to Peter Stein’s luminous Italian version. But Sam Mendes’s revival, with its mixture of visual clarity and emotional charity, unquestionably belongs in the premier league.

My one doubt concerns Mendes’s use of Brian Friel’s “version” of Chekhov’s play: more a Friel-isation than a faithful realisation. For a start Friel builds up the character of Telegin by giving him a running gag about his unstoppable perspiration; but “Do you sweat much yourself?” is not the kind of question a family dependent would ask of a privileged guest like Yelena.

There is also something faintly judgmental about Friel’s version, so that when Yelena scorns the idea of teaching “snotty brats”, you feel she is being portrayed as a hoity-toity urban snob.

But although the version is over-assertive, Mendes’s cast capture brilliantly the characters’ journey from ignorance to knowledge in the course of a disruptive summer. Simon Russell Beale’s Vanya is simply amazing. He offers you the spectacle of an ironic, intelligent 47-year-old man gazing at Yelena with the dotty helplessness of a moonstruck adolescent: aware of his own absurdity but powerless to prevent it.

But Russell Beale is at his finest in the great scene where he wakes from his dream at the news that the professor plans to sell the estate: he seethes with impotent fury at the realisation that his self-denying existence has been totally without point. And, as he denies the professor’s charge that he is a “nonentity”, Russell Beale extends a charity to the character that beautifully matches Chekhov’s.

What Mendes conveys, however, is the extent to which all the characters’ lives have been changed in the course of a summer. Emily Watson’s marvelous Sonya is no dowdy drudge but a passionate woman who grasps Astrov’s hand with sensual fervour only to come up against his emotional indifference. And Mark Strong gives us an unsuually arrogant Astrov whose ecological ideals are touched with sexual vanity but who in the end is forced to confront his essential solitude. Equally, Helen McCrory’s Yelena comes to understand that her destructive magnetism is a way of making up for the barrenness of her marriage. The one character resistant to change is David Bradley’s perfect Professor who departs wreathed in pedagogic smugness.

Crowning an excellent evening is Anthony Ward’s design. But the ultimate test of any Vanya is whether it stirs you to the depths of your soul; and that is one which Mendes’s production passes with flying colours.

· Until November 20. Box office: 020-7369 1732.