This week, London’s National Theatre makes history with its first live broadcast of a live performance: Phèdre, with Helen Mirren and Dominic Cooper, is being simultaneously beamed out to cinemas in London, the U.K., the rest of Europe, Australia and right here in the New York area. This Thursday, theater fans who can’t afford a plane ticket to London can sit back and enjoy a high-definition broadcast at various locations in the city, including Film Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Director’s Guild Theater, and locations in Connecticut, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. After the jump, enjoy Time Out London’s Caroline McGinn’s exclusive interview with Helen Mirren and the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, on a break from rehearsals.
In the cool white light of a rehearsal room at the National Theatre, Helen Mirren chats with Phèdre cast members about the Chelsea Flower Show and TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh who is, apparently, a bit of a sex symbol. The charmingly rumpled middle-aged gardener is indeed the U.K. housewife’s choice. But on the way to the National this morning it was Mirren—not Titchmarsh—who was framed by exotic blooms on the newspaper front pages.
The 62-year-old dame—who hails from Southend-on-Sea and whose family were Pimlico butchers on one side and a tsarist military dynasty on the other—is something of an exotic bloom herself: ice-blond, straight-backed and gracious in a red shawl, she has a reputation for swearing like an Essex girl, but she’s as poised as a white Russian. Everyone gathers around her in a rehearsal room dominated by the stark white planes of Phèdre’s set. Hytner looks relaxed and boyish; it feels as if everyone is enjoying coming down from a morning’s hard work on Racine’s intense tragedy, in which the aging Queen Phèdre becomes obsessed with her stepson Hippolytus (Dominic Cooper). After he rejects her, she accuses him of rape. Their grisly fate is documented in a collage of photocopied illustrations of paintings and poems tacked up on the wall.
Cast and crew ebb away, leaving Mirren and Hytner to do the interview. She remains enthroned in the chair whilst Hytner, in jeans and Converse, perches on the edge of the stage. They’re both deadly serious about their work—the live filming of which is an unprecedented and unpredictable experiment. But they are also wholly comfortable with each other, often cracking up and hooting with laughter at shared memories.
When did you first meet?
Helen Mirren: I don’t remember when we first met, do you?
Nicholas Hytner: I probably remember it better than you. I think I was 12 or 13…
Mirren: Oh don’t, that’s embarrassing! Stop right now.
Hytner: My second cousin is Bruce Myers. I was a snot-nosed schoolkid from Manchester going to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Bruce and that’s when I first saw Helen.
Mirren: Bruce was my boyfriend. I used to live with him and he was with the RSC too. We have strange connections, Nick and I. Nick’s aunt is also a very good friend of mine, she’s a very successful costume designer. Though we’ve only worked together twice—this is the second time.
Hytner: Third time! We did The Madness of King George, remember?
Mirren: Yes, absolutely, on film. Second time in the theater.
You’ve both got a reputation for being strong-willed. Do you fall out?
Hytner: Never.
Mirren: I’m not strong-willed actually. I’m a complete pushover. I love to be told what to do.
How is Phèdre different from your last project together?
Mirren: The last play I did with Nick was Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending. There were often eight or nine people on the set. Here it’s one or two. It’s Peter Brook’s “empty space” in many ways. There are no fancy sets or moving in and out. It’s very dependent on the interior performance. Nick says, “You stand here, you sit there.” He’s brilliant about making a lot of people onstage have focus. This play’s very minimal, more to do with the interior story. I love the way Nick pays so much attention to the people who listen. Often there are two people onstage, one person having a lot to say and the other person listening.
Hytner: With Racine there are great blocks of thought and feeling. The French call them tirades. It’s necessary for the person who is silent to know why they are silent. The great misapprehension is that Racine’s static but it’s emotionally so—
Mirren: Febrile
Hytner: …Febrile. So volatile. It will be interesting to see how it works.
Do you feel scared about simultaneously performing for a cinema audience and a live audience?
Mirren: I do. People often ask me whether I prefer theater or film and the answer is that I prefer the one I’m not doing: The grass is always greener. But here I finally get to do both at the same time. There is no essential difference between them. You’re imaginatively putting yourself into a situation and telling a story. The tools are different. And that’s where the challenge is: finding a tool that can speak to the audience out there but not look weird to the audience out here. My instinct at the moment—because live broadcasts are something the New York Met has done—is to go with the operatic element.
Hytner: These will not be movies. You’re going to see a play broadcast live. It’s the liveness for me that makes the difference. The audience over the country and the world will see Helen in a National Theatre production rather than a Helen Mirren movie.
Do you have to alter the stage movement: more lines delivered to camera?
Hytner: With the actors, we’re paying no attention whatsoever to the filming; it’s not even at the back of or minds now. We will have proper camera rehearsals so we can work out with the video director and cameraman the best way of capturing the experience for a cinema audience. We’re not going to try to make a movie.
Mirren: That’s absolutely important. Otherwise it’s neither fish nor fowl. I’ve always found as an actress that the best thing to do in film or TV or theater is just to lose yourself in it. Think of the story, the character, the worlds we’re in, and forget everything else.
Helen, what was your reaction when the idea of doing Phèdre was first mentioned?
Hytner: It was Helen’s idea.
Why Phèdre?
Mirren: The passion! It’s so fabulously extreme. The form is different. Here you walk on and…tirade! I’d always read about Sarah Bernhardt playing the role, the description of her entrance. What made me want to do this was reading about Bernhardt and those great actresses of the 19th century. I got very romantically caught up in the grandness of that.
Hytner: It’s the part that all serious French actresses have to play. In our theater it’s for an actor, and it’s Hamlet.
Nick, you grew up in Manchester, and Helen, you were born in Essex…. Is it important to you that the National is broadcasting events so much further than the South Bank?
Mirren: I wish it were going to my local town, South End. It’s going to Colchester though, isn’t it? That’s pretty good.
Hytner: It’s going to all sorts of places that aren’t big enough to be toured to. Or internationally—which are too expensive to tour to. It’s great that we’re playing the Zeffirelli’s Digital Cinema in Ambleside. So many theaters have got the right technology now.
Mirren: Of course, pubs do too. Perhaps we should be going out to all the sports pubs? Why not? “Tuesday night, one night only. Forget the f*****g World Cup! Helen Mirren in Phèdre instead.” It would be a very live audience.
Are you nervous about how it will be received internationally, in places like Croatia, the Netherlands and Australia?
Mirren: It’s fantastic that there’s an appetite for that. I hope that, vice versa, there would be an appetite in Britain to see Croatian theater. We so rarely get the opportunity of seeing it.
Hytner: If this works, it could start a whole movement of exchange. Our biggest audience is in Anglophone countries, but I’ve been surprised by how many non-English-speaking countries have wanted it. There’s an audience here who’d want to see European theater too.
Mirren: There’s amazing theater in Georgia, Russia, Sweden. It would be wonderful to see that here in London too.
Phèdre is a very intense role: a woman in the grip of an erotic breakdown. Is it hard to leave her in the rehearsal room?
Mirren: It’s very easy to lose her. I go home, watch Nothing to Declare on TV, which I absolutely love. It’s a reality show about immigration and customs in Australia. It’s fabulous. The perfect Phèdre antidote. No, I don’t take Phèdre home. I do take the script home because I’m relentlessly trying to get the stuff into my head. I don’t think I learn lines easily. It’s a painful process. The language is great in the mouth.
Is the language sexy?
Hytner: Not quite.
Mirren: The byproduct is that it’s sexy. It’s visceral hard, driving. Full of Ted Hughesian energy.
Hytner: Hughes said he wanted it to be like a pane of glass. Racine has a grace and formality which this does not have. It takes you a while to uncover why it’s rhythmically so precise. You realize there’s not a misplaced syllable. It’s refined steel.
Is there chemistry between you and Dominic Cooper?
Hytner: They only have one scene together!
Mirren: And he finds me so utterly repulsive in the scene that he’s practically: “Bleurgh, bleaurghh” vomiting all over me.
Hytner: If there were chemistry, there would be no play.
Mirren: Yes, it would fall apart. I’ll say one thing which will sound like thespian blather: Dominic’s the most delightful person. Funny, kind, no vanity, hard-working. I love him.
Were your female friends jealous about you acting with him?
Mirren: It was more my male actor friends who said he’s fabulous.
Do people stop you on the street a lot? What sort of things do they ask you?
Mirren: Sure, people stop me. Not a lot. When I’m rehearsing I can usually scurry through front of house quite happily. When people approach me, they usually say lovely things. They’re most surprised when they see me in the [toilet paper rolls] section at the supermarket trying to work out which is the cheapest. Very carefully. Studying. Three at £2.95 or 2 at £2.05. Which is the cheapest?
Hytner: I’m really pathetic about sell-by dates.
Mirren: I just go for the cheap things.
The National Theatre broadcast of Phèdre will take place at various venues on Thusday 25 and other dates. Details on local venues here.
