McCrory plays a not so peaky blinde
Star soars in emotive tale of love triangle gone awry
FANS of Peaky Blinders have a golden opportunity to see what Helen McCrory is really made of. I don’t much care for the Brummie gangster TV series, but I am an ardent admirer of McCrory’s acting.
In this production of Terence Rattigan’s post-war drama about a married woman determined to kill herself in the wake of a failed affair, she plays, well, an absolute blinder.
I’m not sure the story is the scorching psychological thriller Carrie Cracknell’s 2016 production thinks it is.
Rattigan’s drama is painfully personal, for sure — it’s said to have been inspired by the suicide of his own lover. But it’s also more English than cucumber sandwiches. The mores and manners of the 1950s make it feel alternately quaint and melodramatic.
Even so, it’s a potently emotional journey for McCrory’s heroine, Hester. On the one hand, she has Peter Sullivan as her husband — a tall, handsome and surprisingly youthful High Court judge. On the other she has Tom Burke as the louche, feckless ex-RAF lover who forgets her birthday, dismisses her suicide bid and finds it all too easy to walk out on her.
Not much of a contest, you’d have thought, and not even the charismatic Burke makes you warm to this comprehensive heel.
BuT McCrory puts them both in the shade with a beautifully fragile performance that’s also steely and tenacious. She’s lived-in yet youthful, gloomy yet upbeat, and desperate yet resilient.
When the door inevitably slams behind Burke on his final exit, it’s as if she’s been hit by a truck.
Her acting is enhanced on screen by the close-ups of her constantly flickering eyes, which are shifty, planning and paranoid.
Some of that would have surely been lost within Tom Scutt’s murky, shadowy boarding house set, on the vast Lyttelton stage. Now, though, you can get the full emotional effect.
I’M INCREASINGLY convinced that if Othello were written today, the Bard would be run out of town. Not only does it come perilously close to enacting the institutional racism experienced by a black army officer in Elizabethan Venice, our hero is also the perpetrator of the most vile domestic abuse, for which he offers nauseating excuses about ‘honour’.
Yet Iqbal Khan’s handsome, visceral and thoughtful production from 2015, starring Holby City’s Hugh Quarshie in the title role, almost saves Shakespeare’s skin.
Khan’s great ruse was to cast Lucian Msamati as Othello’s right-hand man and nemesis, Iago.
Normally played by a white actor, his Iago cunningly uses the racism in Venice to destroy Othello. It’s a sinister study in motiveless malignancy, mixing playfulness, bitterness, cynicism, guilt, self-doubt and even fear.
Quarshie, too, brings great dignity to Othello at the start. He styles him as an urbane Barack
Obama figure, ruefully ignoring the antediluvian attitudes towards him.
He is at ease with the verse and makes it thoroughly accessible, but he’s also impressively volcanic when portraying the fits of rage that eventually undo him And, crucially, Khan’s production doesn’t seek to sentimentalise Othello’s domestic violence.
Joanna Vanderham, as his young bride Desdemona, is an Amazonian blonde who is confident, flirtatious and no wallflower.
I still find the ending hard to stomach, but this is a show of tremendous vitality. With Ciaran Bagnall’s sets of watery Venetian crypts and the bombed-out ruins of Cyprus, as well as gorgeous Moorish music, this is as good as Othello can get today.