{"id":318512,"date":"2011-03-18T00:57:12","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T00:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ghanamma.net\/2011\/03\/18\/baz-bamigboye-lenny-henry-is-a-farce-to-be-reckoned-with-in-shakespeare-role\/"},"modified":"2011-03-18T00:57:12","modified_gmt":"2011-03-18T00:57:12","slug":"baz-bamigboye-lenny-henry-is-a-farce-to-be-reckoned-with-in-shakespeare-role","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2011\/03\/18\/baz-bamigboye-lenny-henry-is-a-farce-to-be-reckoned-with-in-shakespeare-role\/","title":{"rendered":"BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Lenny Henry is a farce to be reckoned with in Shakespeare role"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n<\/p>\n

\nBy
\nBaz Bamigboye<\/a>
Last updated at 12:57 AM on 18th March 2011<\/p>\n

Lenny Henry is laughing all the way to the National Theatre. The stand-up comic is following up on his triumph playing Shakespeare\u2019s Othello by taking on the Bard\u2019s The Comedy Of Errors. <\/p>\n

It will mark his debut on the stage of the country\u2019s flagship theatre.<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, Henry declared that he \u2018didn\u2019t get Shakespeare\u2019, but clearly he has revised that view.<\/p>\n

\n\"Treading<\/p>\n

Treading the boards for the Bard: Lenny Henry as Othello<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n\"Tickling<\/p>\n

Tickling the audience’s funny-bone: Lenny Henry will be taking on the the far funnier role of Antipholus <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

He won the London Evening Standard\u2019s best actor prize for his acclaimed Othello, which he took to the Trafalgar Studios from the West Yorkshire Playhouse. <\/p>\n

Now, he moves from Shakespearean tragedy to the dramatist\u2019s tale of muddles and misunderstandings surrounding two sets of identical twins, where he will certainly require his funnybone.<\/p>\n

Henry will take to the Olivier stage in November playing Antipholus of Syracuse opposite Chris Jarman, who was Shank the gangster in the musical\u00a0 Sister Act, as Antipholus of Ephesus. Dominic Cooke, artistic director of the Royal Court, will direct the farcical escapade, which follows Henry\u2019s Antipholus when he travels with his\u00a0 servant Dromio to Ephesus, where both men are on a quest to find their missing twin brothers.<\/p>\n

The play is pure knockabout comedy and should work like a dream in Henry\u2019s hands, as\u00a0 long as he works out how to conquer the Olivier\u2019s mammoth stage and auditorium.<\/p>\n

My exclusive news comes as the nature of \u2018Englishness\u2019 is being much discussed. Brian True-May, executive producer of ITV\u2019s popular Midsomer Murders, pointed out in a Radio Times interview that the show features no ethnic minorities, adding: \u2018We\u2019re the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.\u2019<\/p>\n

ITV forced the show\u2019s production company to suspend him, and since then all and sundry have got themselves in a bit of a tiswas.<\/p>\n

Most people of colour couldn\u2019t give a monkey\u2019s \u2014 it\u2019s all about politically correct and incorrect Caucasians beating their chests.<\/p>\n

I actually enjoy a bit of \u2018Englishness\u2019 when the mood takes me. I\u2019m fond of Hare, Rattigan and Coward, and on a summer Sunday afternoon I like sitting in my Burton St Leonards, East Sussex, garden with a cup of Fortnum & Mason\u2019s Orange Pekoe tea and a buttered scone while my colonial wife reads Country Life.<\/p>\n

I wonder what True-May, who I have met and who is a perfectly decent man, would have to say about Henry, and Jarman, being cross-cast in a major Shakespearean role that wasn\u2019t the Moor? <\/p>\n

I suspect he would approve and would probably offer Henry a job on Midsomer Murders. And not, one would hope, as a corpse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/h2>\n

Getting flighty with Woody<\/p>\n

\n\"Tips<\/p>\n

Tips from the top: Gemma Jones was given a few pointers by Woody Allen for her character in ‘You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger’\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Gemma Jones said she had a hiccup in her mid-40s when she wondered whether she should give up acting and do something else.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m beyond grateful to her that she didn\u2019t, otherwise we would have been robbed of some beautiful performances on stage and screen .\u2009.\u2009. in particular her Helena in Woody Allen\u2019s new picture, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger.<\/p>\n

I saw the film at Cannes last year and felt she gave a masterclass in bittersweet comic acting. Gemma, who plays Anthony Hopkins\u2019s ex-wife in the film, told me that Woody gave her a few pointers. \u2018The most vital one was to do with the costume \u2014 he said Helena would wear gloves and hats, and that told me she was a little bit flighty.\u2019<\/p>\n

Sam Mendes has just cast Gemma opposite Kevin Spacey in Richard III, which runs at the Old Vic from June 18 for a season and later tours around the world, including Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

Gemma will be talking about working with Woody, and other highlights of her career, at the Tricycle Cinema in North London on Thursday, following a screening of You Will Meet A Tall\u00a0 Dark Stranger.<\/p>\n

Seductress with sex on her mind<\/h2>\n
\n\"A<\/p>\n

A female George Clooney: Anne-Marie Duff says her character in Cause Celebre is like the ‘irresistible’ actor<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Anne-Marie Duff has one word to sum up Alma Rattenbury, the Terence Rattigan\u00a0 heroine she started playing last night: \u2018Irresistible.\u2019<\/p>\n

The actress\u2019s smile lit up the nondescript Number 9 dressing room backstage at the Old Vic we were borrowing for our chat.<\/p>\n

She had just come from rehearsing Cause Celebre with director Thea Sharrock, where they\u2019d been exploring the subtext of Rattigan\u2019s 1977 play based, in part, on a real-life 1930s murder involving a wealthy older woman, her youthful handyman lover and her husband, who winds up battered to death with a mallet. <\/p>\n

\u2018She\u2019s complex, but irresis-tible. She\u2019s like a female George Clooney \u2014 she walks into a room and every man wants to be with her, and every woman wants to be her,\u2019 the actress told me. \u2018I do think she\u2019s a drinker, yes, and I do think sex is on her mind! She\u2019s somebody who\u2019s aware of her nerve endings. But she\u2019s not into sex and murder in a\u00a0 Postman Always Rings Twice kind of way, where murder was the prime thing. <\/p>\n

\u2018Actually, Alma\u2019s a good mother and loves her two sons \u2014 and she loves her husband,\u2019 Anne-Marie insists.<\/p>\n

Alma also has a sense of responsibility and feels that, because she\u2019s the \u2018older woman\u2019, she has a moral obligation towards George (played by Tommy McConnell), who\u2019s in the dock alongside her accused of murder. <\/p>\n

Anne-Marie wonders whether women who fall for much younger men have robbed them of something. \u2018Alma\u2019s had dalliances, probably with her own class and her own age, but with George, well, he falls in love and it\u2019s the first time anything like that has happened to him and it becomes complicated, because his heart is wide open.\u2019<\/p>\n

The crux of the play is the murder trial and the parallel story of the jury forewoman, Edith Davenport (played by Niamh Cusack), who has her own domestic troubles with a seemingly errant husband and a sexually wayward son.<\/p>\n

Mrs Davenport condemns Alma, and her kind, for the wanton seduction of a minor and wants her sent to the scaffold.<\/p>\n

Anne-Marie feels that even though the sexual revolution and Women\u2019s Lib have come and gone, Mrs Davenport\u2019s moral judgments are still with us. \u2018Rattigan wrote this in the Seventies and he couldn\u2019t have predicted that 30 years down the line we\u2019d still be worrying about that stuff women\u2019s morals.<\/p>\n

\u2018The play feels so timely,\u2019 she adds, \u2018because we are so much harsher critics of female behaviour, and there\u2019s the whole stress on physical perfection, as opposed to any kind of achievement, and it\u2019s sometimes a bit frightening to see.\u2019 <\/p>\n

This is the first role Anne-Marie, who is married to James McAvoy, has taken since her son Andrew was born last summer. She believes becoming a mother has probably changed her response to work emotionally, and also, perhaps, her view of Alma.
\u2018Suddenly I have all these immediate points of reference, because she\u2019s a mother, but I\u2019m aware there will be others who feel she\u2019s a disgraceful mother.\u2019<\/p>\n

Interestingly, when the actress was initially approached about the part she had misgivings \u2014 but not on any moral basis. <\/p>\n

First, she was concerned about the class aspect, given that hers is a working-class background.<\/p>\n

Second, she wondered if she had enough firepower to play \u2018all that irresistibility\u2019. She met director Sharrock, who immediately put her mind at rest on that front. <\/p>\n

Anne-Marie \u2014 who is at the Old Vic until June 11 \u2014 should never have to worry about being irresistible!<\/p>\n

A very British affair<\/h2>\n

The MasterCard Olivier Awards were a red carpet treat last Sunday at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and the show, put together by Julian Bird, Nica Burns and Julian Stoneman, was a hundred times better than what used to take place at the dungeon on Park Lane. <\/p>\n

Importantly, it didn\u2019t try to take on the Broadway Tony Awards. It was its own, very British thing. That said, people who watched the red button show on BBC TV said the presentation was dire and it kept leaving the awards and disappearing backstage. Next year they, and Radio 2, need to get their acts together and liaise more with The Society Of London Theatre. Get a proper show together, and get it on a proper channel!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

See the rest here:
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