Dame Helen Mirren “Needs To Raise Her Game”

There is something stagy about Mirren’s hand gestures, insufficient strength, and variety in her voice. In the earlier scenes this consummate professional even occasionally stumbled over her lines. What’s fatally lacking is a sense of tragic abandonment, the feeling that a great actress is laying everything she has before us, mind, heart, soul and guts.

Ten years ago Diana Rigg delivered just that with a Phèdre that proved the peak of her career.

Oh suh-nap, he brought up Diana Rigg, whom many feel should have had Helen’s career!

Spencer goes on to say Mirren’s performance is “far from disastrous” but that she needs to “dare more, expose more, dig deeper.” That sounds like strong praise compared to The Independent‘s Michael Coveney, who gives the production one star (!) and says that Mirren “opts for decorous restraint, as if suggesting that passion is best implied not spoken. That’s simply not what happens in Racine, and it’s so disastrous a misunderstanding that you begin to wonder if Hytner is still fully in control of his faculties, let alone the National Theatre.”

Ouch, y’all. But Benedict Nightingale of The Times nearly hyperventilates from the page in his love of Mirren’s work:

From the moment Mirren crept onstage in a parody burka that veiled and swathed her entirely in purple, then crept out of it, an ashen moth desperate to stay in its cocoon, it was her evening.

Does she miss anything? Maybe a little lust, maybe a moment of joy when she thinks there’s a chance of love, but mostly she offers what the text demands: shame, remorse, self-contempt.

Well, I know one thing: if the gorgeous Dominic Cooper in a black tank top isn’t enough to light Dame Helen’s fire, she has neither a heart nor functioning loins:

In other news:

American admirers of male beauty need no such stunts to appreciate Ronaldo:

You can grate Parmesan on his stomach. He really needs a 12-step program for overtweezing, though.