Theatre Reviews


The Rover
July, 1986
Swan Theatre, Stratford
Jeremy Irons as Willmore, Sinead Cusack as Angelica

Excerpts of Reviews

Sunday Today 7/20/86 by Joan Smith
         "Hallelujah! I have come to praise Jeremy Irons, not to bury him. Since everybody else does, I have for years been trying to appreciate his talents, up to now with a notable lack of success. The Winter's Tale? Far too slight a vessel for the turbulent emotions which rend Leontes. The film Moonlighting? A caricature. The French Lieutenant's Woman? Well, I did try not to laugh.
         But last week, in the RSC's seductive new Swan Theatre at Stratford, I was converted.
         For nearly three hours I sat enthralled and admiring as Irons swaggered his way across the apron stage in Aphra Behn's The Rover. Hearts broke and swords flashed as this cold-hearted, hot-loined cavalier -feminist sensibilities restrain me from calling him "our hero" - wrought havoc in the carnival atmosphere of a Spanish colony.
         Irons, it seems, has found his metier, and it lies in the unexpected field of 17th century sex comedy. His Willmore, a cavalier banished from England for the duration of the Cromwellian interregnum, has all the paradoxical charm of the inveterate woman-hunter - and all his weaknesses.
         If you have ever wondered how a sensible woman friend could possibly give her affections to an out-and-out rogue, you have only to see Willmore/Irons in action to know the answer. It is not the extravagant avowals, the high-flown compliments, which win the heart of the exotic courtesan Angellica Bianca (Sinead Cusack), but the astonishing intensity with which he pursues his end. Where do I join the fan club? "

City Limits, 7/24/86 by Lyn Gardner
        "This joyous version of The Rover may owe as much to director John Barton as Aphra Behn but it remains true to the spirit of it's 17th century author exploring the liberating (although sometimes wayward) budding of female sexual desire during a period when the fate of upper class women was to bartered as brides or barricaded in convents. Transplanted by Barton from Spain to a Spanish colony during carnival (plenty of opportunity for lots of lovely fireworks) and judiciously cut and transposed to bring clarity to a raggle-taggle plot, this is a production confident in its comic effect and bubbling with infectious pleasure that still gives due attention to darker undercurrents - the economic dependence of women, double sexual standards, a courtesan's lonely fear of fading beauty, the crucial difference between love and friendship and desire and sexual fulfillment. A splendid cast led by Jeremy Irons' swaggering, womanizing Willmore (the rover of the title) give their all, clearly enjoying themselves as much as the audience."

Today, 7/16/86 by David Shannon
          "The Rover features a collection of delinquent Englishmen on the rampage abroad. They drink heavily, throw up in private gardens, shout, fight, and pester passing females....The play is by the female writer Aphra Behn and was first performed in 1677....
          The show also provides a rare opportunity to see Jeremy Irons playing the mouth organ. On stage with his wife Sinead Cusack for the first time in nine years, he appears, complete with scarred cheek and pirate head band, as the rover of the title. Shot at twice before he first speaks, he is generally convincing as a likeable Don Juan whose treatment of women in no way deters their interest in him.
          Sinead Cusack, as a prostitute he makes love to and leaves, delivers her lines in a wonky Spanish accent - odd, as her fellow Spaniards all speak perfect English. Accent aside though, she brings a passion and poignancy to her role which help keep frivolity at bay. ...
          It is excellently directed and has good supporting performances from Imogen Stubbs and Geraldine Fitzgerald. So far, it remains Stratford's hit of the season."

Sunday Telegraph, 7/13/86 by Francis King
         "...here is one of those occasions when an audience leaves a theatre in a state of exhilaration. As the Rover, leaping into one amatory escapade after another and then tumbling out again, his dignity in tatters, Jeremy Irons gives the kind of swashbuckling performance that one would have supposed to be beyond him."

Daily Telegraph, 7/11/86 by Eric Shorter
         " After the disappointment of his Leontes in A Winter's Tale, Jeremy Irons takes to the new stage like - well, a swan. He sails through the amorous havoc and futility as Willmore the Rover with a beguiling swagger and a sense of ironical humour which strikes just the right remorseful note of the born skirt-chaser. No actor ever had a darker or more devious eye for the girls."

The Winter's Tale
May, 1986
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Jeremy Irons as Leontes

Excerpts of Reviews

Listener, 5/8/86 by Jim Hiley
       "All sorts of character dimensions go for little in The Winter's Tale. Playing Leontes, Jeremy Irons begins as a slightly stammering chinless wonder, then rapidly turns into a crazed pater-familias in Victorian melodrama mold. "

Observer, 5/4/86 by Michael Ratcliffe
       " Terry Hands' RSC production of The Winter's Tale is a light-headed and undemanding affair which takes what individuality it has from the intelligently well-spoken if somewhat daffy Leontes of Jeremy Irons, a fidgety and ingratiating king who appeals to the reason of the audience in order to justify behaviour which increasingly indicates that he has taken leave of his own. Boy eternal indeed: the proposed murder of Polixenes and the trial of Hermione are the fantastical caprices of a hysterical adolescent remaining in the ruler and the man.
        Mr Irons is an asset to the company and plays Richard II later in the year, but his Leontes looks more like an experiment with ideas for future roles now well within his reach - Aguecheek, Benedick, Hamlet - and it's consequence for The Winter's Tale is to deprive the first two acts of the irrational darkness whose shadow should remain on the spectator's mind throughout the bucolic scenes...that follow it. There is no horror, no mystery, no marvelling, and at many points simply a briskness to get on and have things done."

Financial Times, 5/1/86 by Martin Hoyle
      " Interest soon centres on jealous Leontes. Jeremy Irons plays him as Hamlet in manic mood, twitchy, restless, whimsical and nervy. He can assume rueful humour, as when he focuses on us for a quizzically camp "I am a feather for every wind that blows." That would not disgrace Frankie Howard. Torn by paranoia, his humour ranges from merely mocking mischief to cruel irony. He prowls up and down before pouncing with, "She's an adulteress."
      Frantically scratching his head, biting his nails at Hermione's labour pains, by the play's end he is in a wheelchair, the odd involuntary twitch dangerously recalling Peter Sellars' mad scientist in Strangelove.."

Daily Telegraph, 5/2/86 by John Barber
       " The much-loved Jeremy Irons, making his debut in a major Shakespearean production, has chosen a difficult first role. In The Winter's Tale at Stratford, he plays Leontes, the king who in a jealous rage wrongly accuses his queen of adultery -- then for 16 years repents his stupidity.
          The handsome bearded actor gives it all he has got, but finds himself with less than was required. He uses up his resources improvidently. Stamping his feet, nibbling his fingernails, flinging handfuls of twitching fingers either at the heavens or through his long tresses, Mr Irons keeps repeating his effects. He gives the impression of a neuraesthenic dandy, and never exposes the hell created by the unclean demon within. His shrill voice and thick sibillants do little for Leontes' tortured soul and even less for the poet's verse."

Today, 5/5/86 by David Shannon
        "...the deaths are provided by Leontes: a king in need of a good marriage guidance counsellor, he suspects his innocent wife of being unfaithful. Irons plays him as a brooding head-case who twitches a lot, talks very disjointedly, and has a fringe which will keep getting in his eyes. Sometimes mannered, mostly compelling, Irons' perfomance is, if nothing else, very un-Brideshead."

Daily Mail, 5/5/86 by Jack Tinker
      " Having attained the status of a matinee idol on screens both small and silver, Jeremy Irons returns to the theatre to prove he has all the stature of a fine Shakespearean star as well. The role of King Leontes, though nowhere near as deep as Hamlet, or of the heights of Lear, is as testing a middle ground as any. And Mr Irons comes to grips with its ambiguities in a commendable style. He also avoids its gaping pitfalls.
       It is clear from the outset that he is in the grip of some emotional disturbance, for his manner is as distant and his smile as chilly as the remote white kingdom over which he rules, even while dispensing social pleasantries. The jealousy which so unaccountably overwhelms him as he watches his wife and best friend exchange teasing familiarities is no sudden thing.
       From the way he eyes Paul Greenwood's open and easy-going King Polixenes or demands the attention of his own small son, you understand he is gnawed by some unsealed wound, some unresolved anxiety buried deep in far-off childhood. Jealously is, of course, as unedifying as it is corrosive and Mr Irons speedily gives his a physical eloquence. The eyes grow wild, his cheeks gaunt and chalky, and his speech slips into a scarcely controlled sibilant stutter. All this accompanied with a dizzying speed demanded by Terry Hand's fleet-footed production. Yet beautifully paced and precise for all that."

Richard II
Sept., 1986
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford
Jeremy Irons as Richard

Excerpts of Reviews

Daily Mail, 9/11/86 by Jack Tinker
         "Shakespeare took the time and trouble to fill this play to over-flowing with the most lyrical and lasting poetry of any work in the language. It is, then, a gross discourtesy that not an actor on the stage seems inclined to listen when it is spoken.
         Worse still, it is the gravest miscalculation on the part of director Barry Kyle to encourage his cast to let the verse speak for itself when so few of them can get their tongues around its music. The best of them sit astride this marvellous text without urging it in any direction at all; the rest scarcely set a foot in the stirrup. ....
         Jeremy Irons is first discovered lying wanly on the ground contemplating his ornate throne. After turning a Christ-like profile towards us, he presides wearily over some tiresome ritual - the quarrel that is to end his reign - speaking as if reciting some half-remembered lesson. Mr Irons has proved already to be an arresting and subtle actor. But this arch production offers no hint of the majesty of the last king to rule in direct undisputed line from the Conquerer, nor his struggle to find the man within the monarch."

Sunday Telegraph, 9/14/86 by Francis King
        " Jeremy Irons' Richard, resembling in his last scenes the figure of John the Baptist standing behind the still-reigning Richard in the Wilton Diptych in the National Gallery, is one of the finest in recent years. Physically striking and beautifully spoken, all that it lacks is sufficient contrast between the authoritarian monarch of the first half and the poeticising martry of the second half. At present there is not enough of the former."

Daily Telegraph, 9/12/86 by Eric Shorter
        " Jeremy Irons is the question of the season at Stratford-upon-Avon. Whether it is nobler to stick to your last as a heart-throb of screens great and small, or to take up arms against a sea of theatrical predjudice and, by opposing, end it.
         Having shown in the spring that he lacked the guns for Leontes -his fretting and fury seemed a strain- the actor was entirely at ease in the summer as a dashing cavalier in Aphra Behn's The Rover. And now comes forward as Richard II, that most emotionally elusive of Shakespearean monarchs with his endless self-pity and poetic fancy.
         Mr Irons may be stamped the Jesus Christ Richard because he looks so startlingly messianic before his murder; and is more or less crucified by his assailants in Barry Kyle's production. ...His glazed preoccupation and ironical remoteness from anything but the effect he is making at the moment -even the tears as he awaits assassination- are finally moving because at last he appears to feel something real for his horse, Barbary, and the idea of Bolingbroke riding it.."

Camelot
August 14, 2005
Hollywood Bowl, LA
Jeremy Irons as King Arthur

Review from the Los Angeles Times

Knight has his day in Bowl's 'Camelot';
Jeremy Irons' King Arthur cedes musical honors to James Barbour's Lancelot.

Those big screens at the Hollywood Bowl have rarely felt so organic to the hillside amphitheater as they did Sunday night, when they blazed with a live feed of Jeremy Irons portraying a king given to soul-stirring speeches.

The well-regarded movie actor headlined a one-night-only presentation of "Camelot" that also benefited from the reunion of key talents from the Bowl performance two years ago of another Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe musical, "My Fair Lady." Melissa Errico was once more on hand to play the Julie Andrews role, this time as Guenevere, as was Paxton Whitehead (Col. Pickering in "My Fair Lady"), again serving as pal and all-around second banana, but now as Pellinore. Gordon Hunt also returned to direct.

With the 1956 "My Fair Lady" as its predecessor, the 1960 "Camelot" had an extremely tough act to follow. The same was true of these Bowl presentations. Although audiences instinctively respond to "Camelot's" "brief, shining moment" of civilized conflict resolution at the Round Table, the retelling of Arthurian legend rarely generates the sheer rapture of "My Fair Lady." Rarely either did the Bowl "Camelot" duplicate the craft or polish of 2003's "Lady."

No matter. The crowd came to cheer Irons even through his pitch-challenged singing -- and was repaid with a presentation that was musically pleasurable in most other respects, from James Barbour's gloriously resonant vocal work as Lancelot to John Mauceri's supple conducting of 48 instrumentalists in the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

Irons compellingly conveyed Arthur's growth from ordinary man -- nervous, frustrated and excitable -- to wise, confident king. And when he applied his plummy baritone speaking voice to Arthur's speeches, well, he could have run for office.

Try though he did, though, he couldn't generate the same effect with his singing. He fared best in his first number, "I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight," which allowed for a forceful, dynamic approach, but he lost ground in songs that required jauntiness (the title tune) or, heaven forbid, romance ("How to Handle a Woman"). Hanging consistently beneath pitch, Irons pulled melodic lines out of shape and, in the big-screen close-ups of such moments, never looked comfortable.

Fortunately, Errico could be depended upon to salve the audience's assailed ears. Her sweet, fluttering soprano sparkled with mischief during "The Lusty Month of May" and resolved to a lovely shimmer in "Before I Gaze at You Again."

Loping across the stage with casual, athletic confidence, Barbour's Lancelot quickly established himself as head jock among the knights, and when the singer opened his rich, ringing bass-baritone to full power during "If Ever I Would Leave You," his amplified voice must have been audible even to the tourists down on Hollywood Boulevard.

Whitehead -- with that incredibly mellifluous voice that makes him the James Earl Jones of comedy -- was a hoot as comic-relief character Pellinore, and Malcolm Gets made evil a whole lot of fun as he sneered and cackled his way through the role of mayhem-minded Mordred.

Arthur creates a paradise, only to see it destroyed when emotions upset the equilibrium. That message lingered after Sunday's ovations, giving the audience something to think about as a night of movie-star magic gave way again to bittersweet reality.


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