Dame Helen Mirren returned to the stage last night (11 June 2009, previews from 4 June) for the first time since winning the Best Actress Oscar for the 2006 film The Queen in order to take the title role in Greek tragedy Phedre.

The production also brings Mirren back to the National Theatre, where she made her last stage appearance, six years ago, in Howard Davies’ 2003 production of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. Phedre, directed by NT artistic director Nicholas Hytner, runs in rep in the NT Lyttelton until 27 August 2009. On 25 June, it makes history as the first production to be broadcast live to more than 100 venues around the world, including 50 cinema screens across the UK – as part of the new NT Live initiative.

Jean Racine’s 1677 play, translated from the French by Ted Hughes, is based on the Greek myth about the queen who falls passionately in love with her stepson Hippolytus in her husband Theseus’ absence. Mirren follows in the footsteps of other famous Phedres including Glenda Jackson, Diana Rigg and, most recently at the Donmar Warehouse in 2006, Clare Higgins.

Mirren is joined by Dominic Cooper as Hippolytus, Margaret Tyzack as Phedre’s nurse and confidante Oenone and Stanley Townsend as Theseus. The cast also features Ruth Negga, John Shrapnel, Chipo Chung and Wendy Morgan. The production is designed by Bob Crowley, with lighting by Paule Constable.

The majority of overnight critics welcomed Mirren back to the stage with a slew of four-star reviews this morning. Her Phedre, they said, is “hugely intelligent”, “hauntingly memorable” and “forceful”: it’s a “class act from a classy actress” who is undoubtedly “in her prime”. Nevertheless, the production avoids being a mere star vehicle for Mirren by being “impeccably cast” throughout, from Dominic Cooper’s “graceful, noble” Hippolytus to Stanley Townsend’s “big, brutal” Theseus and Margaret Tyzack’s “comic” Oenone.

Whatsonstage.com’s Michael Coveney’s one-star verdict that Racine is lost in English translation, whatever – “it’s nobody’s fault, really, but it just doesn’t work” – is at striking odds with other critics who felt that Nicholas Hytner’s “almost unerringly fine” production of Ted Hughes’ “throbbingly alive” version proves just the opposite.

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June 12, 2009 by Kirsty • Articles, Reviews

Playing a living, universally known figure has to be one of the biggest challenges an actor can face. That’s what makes Helen Mirren’s performance as Queen Elizabeth in Stephen Frears’ “The Queen” such a marvel. Mirren bears only a passing resemblance to her majesty, and “The Queen” is a fictionalized extrapolation of the royal family in crisis amid the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death in 1997.

Yet Mirren so fully becomes Elizabeth, the film eerily feels like a privileged, stolen peek at life inside the palace walls. Her Elizabeth is such a commanding presence – icily august one moment, mournfully human the next – Mirren could emerge as a best-actress front-runner at the Academy Awards.

A thoughtful, respectful, wonderfully sly study of stuffy, closed-door tradition clashing with today’s culture of public spectacle, “The Queen” follows Frears’ pairing last year with another grand dame of British cinema, Judi Dench, in “Mrs. Henderson Presents.”

Except for a brief prologue and epilogue, “The Queen” takes place entirely during the week following Diana’s death. Yet Frears – whose credits include “High Fidelity” – and screenwriter Peter Morgan manage to turn the story into a rich film biography examining Elizabeth’s entire reign and even the legacy she’ll leave.

The film probes her ascension to the throne as a young woman whose father may have been driven to an early death by kingly pressures, through her iron-willed role as caretaker of the institution in an age when the relevance of royalty is uncertain.

“The Queen” opens with Elizabeth’s chilly first meeting with Britain’s eager new pup of a prime minister, Tony Blair, magnificently embodied by Michael Sheen, who previously played Blair in Frears’ TV movie “The Deal.”

A few months later comes the early-morning call about the car crash in Paris that killed Diana as her driver sped in front of pursuing photographers. The nation is thrown into profound grief, while Blair’s proclamation of Diana as the “people’s princess” puts his nascent, shaky role as leader onto sounder footing.

Meantime, Elizabeth, husband Prince Philip (James Cromwell), and the rest of the royals remain holed up in Balmoral, the family’s Scottish retreat. The queen is adamant that she owes no words of comfort, kindness or tribute to her subjects over Diana, who was no longer a member of the royal family after her divorce from Prince Charles.

The press, public and Blair’s government see it differently, their exasperation intensifying to near rage as the royal family bumbles about its business as if nothing has happened.

“Will someone please save these people from themselves?” Blair seethes over the queen’s indifference to the public clamour.

Blair emerges as a white knight for Elizabeth, their differences in age and ideology evaporating as the prime minister doggedly exhorts the queen to do the right thing and console a wounded country.

Morgan’s dialogue is razor-sharp and packed with surprising humour that the actors weave very naturally into the dark drama playing out between a queen and her people.

The film races along at a riveting pace, Frears judiciously punctuating the cloistered exchanges inside the seats of power with archival footage of Diana and the assemblage of mourners outside Buckingham Palace.

Along with the imperiously indignant Cromwell, the supporting cast is brilliantly rounded out by Alex Jennings as a skittish Prince Charles, Helen McCrory as Blair’s wily wife, Roger Allam as the queen’s diligent aide and Sylvia Syms as the queen mother, who is often hilarious in her regal dismissiveness of the outside world.

Though they share relatively little screen time, Mirren and Sheen forge a deep connection, the formal relationship between queen and politician subtly underlined with deference, doubt, anxiety and even traces of affection.

Either performance easily could have lapsed into caricature, but Mirren and Sheen present gracious, humane portraits of two people whose conviction over their place in the world is shaken by unprecedented circumstance.

“The Queen” debuts a month after Mirren won an Emmy for her portrayal as the monarch’s predecessor and namesake in the miniseries “Elizabeth I.” How fitting – and well deserved – if Mirren were to take home an Oscar for playing the Elizabeth of modern times.

Three and a half stars out of four.

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August 09, 2007 by Kirsty • Reviews

Helen Mirren’s allure lies not in finding what’s regal in every woman she plays, but in finding what’s womanly in every royal. That, at any rate, is the most promising key I’m fiddling with these days while trying to unlock the secrets of Mirren’s power in The Queen, a superb re-creation of events in the week following the death of Princess Diana in 1997. I realize my notion is simply that of just another Mirrenite who has been smitten and awed by the actress in equal measure for decades, from The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover to The Madness of King George through all six seasons of Prime Suspect to date, as millions were dazzled by Diana herself. But the insight may help to explain why this engrossing and unexpectedly penetrating drama, with its truly fresh perspective on how response to the news of one dead princess recalibrated the relationship between the British monarchy and the masses, is more than just another pop entry in history’s ongoing Dianathon.

With prickly dignity of bearing, precision of aristocratic diction, and the gestures of one born and bred to command even in domestic activities as intimate as dialling a phone, walking a dog, or reading the morning newspapers over breakfast, Mirren conjures Elizabeth as an identifiable flesh-and-blood wife, mother, grandmother, and woman with a job to do. She also conveys the importance — and the majesty, unaffected by political fashion — of the institutional Elizabeth II of the House of Windsor, Head of the Commonwealth and Defender of the Faith, a living embodiment of her empire’s proud history. In a bathrobe or a crown, watching the telly or receiving curtsies, Mirren’s self-possession is a grace that appears at once willed and innate. As she did earlier in the year playing Elizabeth I on HBO, the actor excels at projecting the imperial, not the imperious.

And if that doesn’t do enough to explain the thrall of The Queen, there’s always the ingenuity of this particular Diana angle itself to commend the season’s most unlikely grand entertainment — an art-house production that might even appeal to big Saturday-night megaplex crowds. Sidestepping a whole lot of media hyperventilation with a discretion that does not prevent even-handedness, director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan (who also co-wrote The Last King of Scotland) nevertheless convey important sociological information. They explore how the sensational death of a flashy divorcée (smashed in a car in Paris with her Egyptian lover) was felt so deeply by a populace who identified with the glamorous People’s Princess. They question Elizabeth and her quite clueless husband, Philip (marvellous James Cromwell), for remaining so unresponsive to the need their subjects had for an official sign of Windsor bereavement. (The Queen suggests that only Prince Charles seemed to get it, and he was, in small ways and big, in no position to overrule his mother.) They admire the way Tony Blair (Kingdom of Heaven’s Michael Sheen, avoiding caricature), then a youthful, progressive prime minister brand-new to the office, navigated between the growing discontent of the people, the blood scent picked up by the media, and the elaborate delicacies of etiquette when dealing with the labyrinth of palace functionaries.

The Queen pays serious attention to how an ancient monarchy operates in a modern country briskly uninterested in (and even disapproving of) day-to-day Windsor life, and how, really, it took the People’s Grief to breach walls of mutual disregard. And Frears, who probed class ugliness in melting-pot England with far less delicacy three years ago in Dirty Pretty Things, shows extraordinary discernment and restraint in his choice of settings: Elizabeth (already on the throne for 45 years) receiving Blair and his antimonarchist wife, Cherie; Elizabeth in her family rooms eating supper on a tray with her wily old mother (Sylvia Syms); Elizabeth and Philip touring the mountain of flowers piled outside their palace, chatting with selected onlookers in a ritual indistinguishable from a stage performance.

Which brings me back to Mirren, bewigged in her character’s impregnable Hairspray ‘do, or reading a televised message to her people through matronly eyeglasses. It takes daily effort to keep that hair and those specs going year after year, prime minister after prime minister. It takes a sense of duty, even when a woman wants to stay in a bathrobe and weep. Mirren shows us what it’s like to want to weep and then, by the grace of God, to rule. She rules.

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August 09, 2007 by Kirsty • Reviews