Actually, the play seems to me ripe for revival. He has moved the action from 1912 to 1938, arguing it is best set in a starchy era it is also the year of a sensitive film version, adapted by Shaw, with Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard. Jones, the multi-award-winning theatre and opera director whose productions include Anna Nicole and The Hairy Ape, thinks Pygmalion needs “a good old overhaul”. With Paul Mescal in A Streetcar Named Desire. She could have done this interview wordlessly. As we talk, her hands are winging away in their own conversation. Ferran’s particular talents – she won the Critics’ Circle award for best actress this year for Streetcar and for best newcomer in 2015 – are also evident off stage. Such physical fluency is rare on the British stage, where actors are more likely to be distinguished by vocal elasticity. Yet perhaps it was she who was doing the unwiring? She looked as if she was hoovering up the ectoplasm. Ferran made the tiny part a focus for the spookiness of the play. Then the maid came on, swivelling in all directions, wildly loopy and alarming. In March 2014 London’s Gielgud theatre was crammed with fans of 88-year-old Angela Lansbury, appearing in Blithe Spirit as Noël Coward’s gargoyle ghost hunter. Her professional debut nine years earlier was equally striking. Stepping tremendously into the lead role in A Streetcar Named Desire days before opening at the Almeida in January this year, she became, alongside Paul Mescal, part of a production which broke ticket-sales records – and dismantled the traditional idea of a classic heroine. Patsy Ferran is now most celebrated for a theatrical coup.
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