Rachel Weisz was a sensational, sulky Gilda in this production, and Gish, no way fazed, played Helen Carver as a screeching socialite in a glittering sheath. A role in a fringe production in Paddington led to the acquisition of an agent of her own, and a notable cameo in Sean Mathias's 1994 revival of Noel Coward's Design for Living at the Donmar Warehouse. She first thought of going into journalism as a student she won a prize for an article she wrote for Harper's magazine, and the then editor, Beatrix Miller, said she would take her on after graduation.īut Lou decided to change direction and took an office job with the actors' agent Jeremy Conway, where she answered the telephone and served the tea, sometimes jokingly dressed in a waitress uniform. After Macaulay church school, Alleyn's in Dulwich, and Furzedown school, Wandsworth, she took a degree at Camberwell School of Art. She had been forced to leave the production when her illness took hold again. Warner himself described Lou as "a wonderful, positive presence, a superb actress whose spirit remained with us for the entire run". Typically, they arranged company visits to the local bowling alley and teased their leading man by calling him "Dave" - "He's so not a Dave," they said. Lou and Kay were returning to Chichester in part to memorialise their mother's last stage performance there - as Arkadina in The Seagull in 2003 (a production in which Kay played Nina) - but also to get over it. Her younger sister, Kay Curram, played Cordelia. In the second, she tore up the stage, dashing to the floor the Bible proffered by a distraught Albany (Raad Rawi) and channelling her evil complots through a serpentine presence beautifully contrasted with Zoe Waites's choleric Regan. If you would like to see the Concentric Circles production of Phaedra which runs until March 9 at the Riverside Studios please call the Box Office on 020 8237 1111.In the first, she was sleek, reasonable, assured. But I must say that after performances I do feel pretty drained!". Ever since I first encountered Tennessee Williams – and there are bits of Blanche DuBois in Phaedra – I realised I have a knack of playing people with fatal flaws. "I have done lots of these highly dramatic classical roles and doing them helps to hone your craft. If you see the technique it hasn’t worked. When performing it I think it is absolutely imperative that the metre and rhythms of the text are so that the narrative is crystal clear to an audience. While our translation by John Cairncross sticks faithfully to the spirit of the original – and that is wonderful – the original French is sublime and very concise. My French is poor but I did have the French with me which is so useful for punctuation and emphasis. Racine is a spare and blisteringly honest writer unlike his contemporary Corneille who is much more flowery. "As well as the raw emotions of the story the language is wonderful. Like Princess Diana she is in a marriage of state and she falls in love desperately for the first time in her life. She does not die out of a sense of shame. When she poisons herself she is preparing to die not for what she has done but for what she feels. But as a character her honesty appeals to me together with her sense of duty and honour. "Phaedra is essentially a good woman who has fallen foul of her hormones (or of Venus depending on which way you want to look at it.) She verges on an appalling affliction which verges on paedophilia – after all the boy was very young. It is a difficult part because it is not quite a full-blood-let-rip sort of role such as Clytemnestra. This becomes jealousy when she learns that he loves another and then her already terrible situation is exacerbated by guilt when she learns of Hippolytus’s death by a sea monster.
She has an all-consuming passion for her stepson Hippolytus which she believes was inflicted upon her by Venus.
“Phaedra is one of the great roles – dramatic actresses from Rachel in the 1840s and Sarah Bernhardt in the 1870s have all done it. Here she talks about the role in the first production from a new company offering innovative productions of classical repertoire and starring established performers alongside promising newcomers. Studios she tackles one of the pinnacles of classical tragedy, the title role in Jean Racine's 1677 play Phaedra in which overwhelming passion and anguished love lead to her death.
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