Helen Mirren returned to the stage as Phedre at the National Theatre last night after a five-year absence. And this time, she promised, the production would be shorter – if not exactly sweet.
‘The last time I was in a wonderful production at the National of Mourning Becomes Electra,’ she told me, ‘but it was very long, really tiring emotionally. It had Corin Redgrave, Paul Rhys and Eve Best and it was great – but it was four-and-three-quarter hours long.
‘When we were just stopping for our first interval other plays were taking their bow and then going out for a glass of wine.
‘One of the great things about Phedre is that it’s short. It’s very intense and runs for an hour and three-quarters.’
Helen, who won an Oscar for her brilliant portrait of Elizabeth II in The Queen, plays Phedre, the Athenian queen who reveals that she’s madly in love with her stepson, played by Dominic Cooper.
‘Everyone keeps getting themselves in such an emotional muddle. The step-son Hippolyte is in love with someone else. I’m in love with him. And my husband may or may not be missing. It’s a hornet’s nest,’ the actress told me.
Helen had told NT director Nicholas Hytner that she’d quite like to do Phedre. After taking part in a reading, she decided she’d love to do it – particularly when Hytner said he’d direct.
‘I’d worked with him before,’ Helen explained. ‘I did Madness, the movie – that’s not the pop group but the film of the Alan Bennett play The Madness Of King George,’ she joked, adding they’d also collaborated on a Tennessee Williams play at the Donmar.
She told me she loves returning to the stage. ‘I guess my ambition as a young actress was always to be a good theatre actress. I didn’t have the ambition to be a movie star or a movie actress, even though I did films right from the beginning. But as you get older, theatre gets more exhausting. Your fear gets greater, you sometimes feel more exposed, and that you’ve got more to lose.
‘On the other hand, I’m dying for it,’ she said with a wide, beaming smile. ‘I can’t wait.’
Just before rehearsals started at the National, Helen completed work on The Debt, a film with a scorching story about Israeli agents and a plot involving a Nazi butcher. It’s from the studio run by Matthew Vaughn and Kris Thykier.
Helen has been popping over to Notting Hill from time to time to do post-production on her spy work with director John Madden.
All very different from The Queen. The actress said she simply loved the Obamas meeting Her Majesty. ‘I loved Michelle putting her arm around the Queen. Obviously, the Queen had made her feel comfortable enough for her to be able to do it.’
Helen also mentioned how Her Maj invited her to take tea in the royal box at the races.
‘There were about five or six of us. I thought there would be 30 or more. It was lovely!’
The movie was mentioned indirectly.
‘She did introduce me to the Sultan of Brunei as being the person who had played her in the film. She said something like “This is Dame Helen Mirren, who portrayed me. . .” She was fabulous.’
A performance of Phedre will be broadcast live, thanks to sponsorship from Travelex, on to some cinema screens on June 25 in the UK through Picturehouse, Odeon, Cineworld and some independent cinemas.
It will also be beamed into movie houses live across Europe and Scandinavia, and later in the USA, Australia, Canada and South Africa. Other NT productions, including Alan Bennet’s new work The Habit Of Art, will be beamed into cinemas.
The production runs from June 11-August 27 at the Lyttelton Theatre in London, before moving on to runs in Greece and Washington DC.