Ellen Terry With Eileen Atkins, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse - theatre review

The Globe’s intimate new space brings star of the past to life
26 January 2014

The Globe’s new indoor space, the intimate, candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, opened to acclaim last week with The Duchess of Malfi, and now it hears its first verses of Shakespeare spoken.

Dame Eileen Atkins takes on, not always entirely successfully, the renowned Victorian actress and fêted Shakespearean Ellen Terry (1847-1928), and adapts some of the popular lectures on the playwright that Terry gave towards the end of her career.

Along with sparkily robust and often unconventional insights gleaned from a long and fruitful working life, the lectures contained meaty excerpts for Terry to act out.

The first problem with this amiable 70-minute show — beyond the fact that top-price tickets are priced at an eye-watering £60 (dearest seats in the main Globe space are £39) — is that we gain almost no background to Terry the actress. We need to turn to the informative essay in the programme for this, but Atkins could surely have provided a little context.

The other trouble is that there’s only a limited sense of the overall through-line of the lectures, although what is unmistakable is Terry’s wry, dry wit.

“I think it ought to be suggested from the first that there is something queer about her”, she says firmly of Ophelia. She goes on to tell us that her research for the role at an asylum found all the lunatics “too theatrical”.

Anecdotes such as this are priceless, but crop up all too rarely. Still, we learn Terry delightfully divided Shakespeare heroines into the tall and triumphant (her favourite was Beatrice, plus Rosalind) and the short and pathetic (Lady Macbeth).

Too many of the characters Atkins plays sound indistinguishable, but her Juliet bursts with real feeling.

Best of all is her Lear, who arrives to illustrate a point Terry makes about Cordelia. With drooping, pitiful mouth, redolent of a recent stroke, he is deeply poignant in his Act Five weakness.

Until Feb 23 (020 7401 9919, shakespearesglobe.com)

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