Gal Gadot Wonder Woman
ISRAELI STAR Gal Gadot dazzled on the red carpet this week, as she attended a series of worldwide premieres for her new movie, Wonder Woman. Gadot plays the starring role in the film, which is based on the popular DC comic-book character. However, the actress had to wear flat heels on the red carpet, and wasn’t in superhero form, thanks to a back injury.
The 32-year-old said she had hurt her back “at the worst time — I tried to save the world once again and it’s heavy duty”, she joked.
Wonder Woman’s UK premiere is one of a few cancelled after the mass murder in Manchester. On the red carpet in Los Angeles, Ms Gadot said that her “heart and thoughts and prayers go out to the families” of the victims.
Gadot gave few interviews in the months leading up to the film’s release, as she was pregnant with a second child with husband Yaron Versano. Baby Maya was born in March; her arrival announced by Gadot on Instagram with a picture of her fiveyear-old daughter Alma pushing baby Maya in a carrier adorned with balloons. The military gave me good training for Hollywood HOME, Manchester
SWATHED IN a black shawl and sitting on a minimalist bench with no back-rest, Rose tells us she is sitting shivah. It would be an understatement to say that this 80-year-old, played here by a 78-year-old Janet Suzman, has led a full life.
It began in a Ukrainian shtetl, she reveals. The Second World War, a period in Atlantic City and running a Palm Beach hotel are among the many milestones passed by the fictional heroine in Martin Sherman’s
Gadot is a bit of a wonder woman herself, with an early CV that combines winning beauty contests, studying law and serving in the IDF. She also excelled at basketball at school, helped by her height.
“The army wasn’t that difficult for me. The military gave me good training for Hollywood,” she has said in the past. The army was followed by modelling and law studies, but those were soon abandoned
When she appeared in the Fast and Furious franchise, she impressed director Justin Lin with her knowledge of weapons, and her ability to perform her own stunts.
Wonder Woman is her biggest role so far, and she told Fashion magazine that she was thrilled to be cast: “She is the ultimate symbol of strength. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d grow up to be in a movie playing someone who influenced as many women as she has.”
Reports from early showings in the US are uniformly positive and, while social media chatter around these fan-screenings does generally skew towards the enthusiastic end of the scale, advance word is that Wonder Woman is a brighter and less unremittingly grim prospect than its DC predecessors Batman vs Superman and Man of Steel.
It’s a welcome change from the negative comments that emerged when Gadot was cast, with comic fans criticising everything from her nationality to her physique. She seems to have won the critics over.
The change in tone may partly 1999 play. The red-headed love of her life, starvation in the Warsaw ghetto, witnessing the murder of her threeyear-old daughter casually shot dead by a passing Ukrainian soldier — these, too, are milestones.
Sherman is best known for his play Bent which almost single-handedly reminded the world that gays were among the Nazis’ first victims. This one, however, is a different kind of play. Written as a one-woman monologue, Rose is a particular kind of Jew who came from a particular kind of place. She’s an amalgam of suffering and humour. Her hypochondriac father “was in bed for years,” she tells us. “He never stopped dying.” For her mother, being Jewish comes with the a responsibility: being good. “There was only black and white with her which ironically made her seem more Christian.”
We’re only a few minutes into this two-hour show and already Rose be ascribed to director Patty Jenkins, the first woman to take charge of a superhero blockbuster. The main criticism levelled at the first two films in the new DC comics “universe”directed by Zack Snyder, and the third, David Ayers’s Suicide Squad, was that the tone was altogether too bleak for what are, after all, just films about men in tights having fights.
Gal doesn’t even wear tights in this one. Just bare legs and a fustanella. She plays a Greek demigod who gets mixed up in the First World War to offset the influence of malevolent Greek god of war Ares.
Based on what we’ve seen so far you can expect a certain amount of droll fish-out-of-water shenanigans alongside the action and adventure. Lucy Davis (Dawn in The Office) pops up in the film as Etta Candy, a comic relief sidekick who was a regular in classic 1940s Wonder Woman comics and has featured sporadically ever since.
Chris Pine, best known as the new Captain Kirk in the Star Trek films, is also on hand as Wonder Woman’s wisecracking love interest Steve Trevor. So it’s fair to say there’s something for everyone. Gal doesn’t even wear tights, just bare legs
‘Wonder Woman’ goes on general release in the UK on June 1. Read Michael Moran’s review at www. theJC.com/film has established herself as eminently quotable. If she’s an archetype there can be little doubt that, for Sherman at least, she is also the embodiment of a Jewish conscience, one that asks questions about Jewish morality since the Holocaust.
“Judaism’s largest contribution to mankind is to ask questions that can’t be answered,” says Rose, although for her — and, one senses, her creator, too — the question about whether Jews continue to be as moral as Rosa’s mother expects, is not one of them. The answer lies in the sweetness Rose tasted when Israel was established and then the sourness that came when the country became an occupier of Palestinian land.
Two hours of monologue performed It’s a treat to see this still potent actor in full sail by a single actor can make for a dramatically spartan evening. So it says much about Sherman’s writing, and also the potency of Suzman’s performance that this first revival since the play premiered at the National Theatre is a richly rewarding production.
Director Richard Beecham opts for an expressionistic setting. Rather than set the piece in Rosa’s Florida hotel, Simon Kenny’s minimalist design focuses attention by enclosing the play within a room-sized box. And, as Rose’s memory alights on the locations of her life, each place is evoked with subtly deployed sound and accompanying colours that spread across the room’s bare walls like mirages.
Suzman is terrific. And even though on this preview night her performance leaned somewhat on the use of an autocue, it’s a treat to see this still potent actor in full sail and in complete command of each line as the play veers between the harrowing and the humorous.
Yet, although Suzman’s is an utterly convincing portrayal, it’s one that belies the artifice of Sherman’s creation. There is a neatness to Rose’s narrative that links the suffering of Jews to suffering caused by Jews. For some it will surely imply a moral equivalence between the two, which, depending on your view of Israel could be either offensive or useful.
Still, in these times there are other resonances. Rosa is the persecuted survivor who was given refuge by an America that has now raised its drawbridge against many of her modern equivalents. The real doubts about this play are not so much political as theatrical. Because for all the consummate skill displayed by Suzman, the nagging sense here is that Rose is actually Sherman in disguise.