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London Spy: Ben Whishaw, dreamy lover/genius Ed Holcroft and sage Jim Broadbent
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.backstage.com/interview/remember-ben-whishaws-name/
Photo Source: Matt Doyle
Interview
Remember
Ben Whishaw’s
Name
By Briana Rodriguez
Posted March 16, 2016, 11 a.m.
Ben Whishaw is competing to be heard over the hammering coming from the Walter Kerr Theatre’s orchestra level. Sitting in the mezzanine, he has to raise his typically subdued voice over the incessant banging as the tech crew finishes construction on the set for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The stage decor, which director Ivo van Hove has very consciously had installed piecemeal alongside the play’s performances, is mirroring the cast’s progress; previews are eight days away and they’re five pages shy of the Tony-winning play’s grim culmination. It’ll be the first full run of Whishaw’s Broadway debut.
Playing protagonist John Proctor, the deeply religious but fallible outsider in a Puritanical community splintered by the Salem witch trials, Whishaw, under van Hove’s guidance, is approaching the production’s cornerstone role with an intuitive looseness. There are no heady discussions about the material and no table reads, just a strict five-hour-a-day rehearsal from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. alongside Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan, Tony winner Sophie Okonedo, Game of Thrones alum Ciarán Hinds, and the rest of the 15-actor ensemble.
For Whishaw, the rehearsal process has been an exercise in making discoveries in the moment and uncovering what the play “ought to be” in his respective space.
“Ivo encourages you to not be logical; he’ll say, ‘OK, so this moment you let rip. You push her up against the door and you scream at her, but in the next second you drop that and you’re calm and you’re rational,’ ” Whishaw explains with kinetic hand movements. “So he sort of gives you something, a sphere to play in, but it’s not psychological…. Because if you come at this play like, ‘I’m going to make this a coherent interpretation,’ you smooth it out, you iron out the weird contradictions and jumps.”
John’s termination of his illicit affair with young Abigail (Ronan) sets The Crucible in motion and triggers a vengeance plot with accusations of witchcraft flying at dozens of townspeople, including John’s wife, Elizabeth (Okonedo).
For Whishaw, who adamantly does not subscribe to a specific acting method (“No, I really, really don’t. No.”), the contradictions of Salem’s residents were his jumping-off point for the play, which is loosely based on the notorious 17th-century trials. Examining people who so deeply rely on each other for survival yet are killing each other over little more than needles and poppets—plus John’s belief that he’s a good Christian despite his sins—took precedence.
“It’s this thing [Ivo and I] talked briefly about, which is cognitive dissonance—when you have two things that are opposites. They can’t sit together, but nonetheless…” he explains. “One of the first things Ivo said to us was, ‘[The Crucible is about] people trying to be humane, but in their attempts to be humane they become inhumane.’ There’s a point they cross and they no longer know what they’re doing. And it does become about this sort of fundamentalist mindset that all of the characters are confined by, trapped in.”
Miller used the real-life trials as an allegory for the decades-long communist “witch hunt” that led to hundreds of artists, including the playwright himself, being blacklisted in show business from the late 1940s through the early ’60s. (The McCarthy era, as it’s known, was also the setting for last year’s Trumbo and the Coen brothers’ latest, Hail, Caesar.)
To pull the production into modern times, van Hove has taken it out of the Massachusetts backwoods and into an environment that, much like his previous Miller engagement, A View From the Bridge, strips away the world’s excess in a way that gives a new sheen to a familiar narrative.
Unlike in the 1996 film adaptation and countless theatrical productions, traditional Puritan clothing has been replaced with private school uniforms. A gray classroom with a chalkboard that runs nearly the full length of the back wall slowly fills with drawings and words written or scribbled by characters to symbolically chronicle the buildup to the three-hour play’s climax. And the lighting (by set designer Jan Versweyveld), which oscillates between chilly, hospital white and warm oranges, visually magnifies the ever-present score by Philip Glass.
Whishaw’s casting is yet another alteration to the play’s standard formula. Where the farmer has in the past been portrayed as a brute force, his rough edges are emotionally and physically softened by Whishaw’s vulnerability and wiry frame.
“When we first really met, he was greedy and hungry for inspiration,” van Hove says of his lead. “I must say, I’m really impressed. He’s there with his colleagues, he’s never selfish, never egocentric. He really wants to tell a story together with everybody and that was already there the first moment I saw him. He’s tender and sweet and at the same time a strong man, which is perfect for John.”
It’s a New Age interpretation of The Crucible: “These tribal factions and frictions and bullying and accusations and forcing conformity on people,” as Whishaw explains it. “Working with Ivo, it seems like a completely different play again.”
What makes Whishaw an atypical leading man is this inclination to deflect the attention away from himself and onto those around him. And this same ability to seemingly remove himself from the equation is what makes him so compelling to watch as an actor.
In interviews he pauses often, as if to weigh each word and be sure he means what he says, but onstage, he embodies immediate conviction. He moves with purpose and articulates complex emotions about Abigail, his peers, and Elizabeth with little more than a twitch of his fingers.
His particular style has revealed new layers to Hamlet during his performance at the Old Vic, to Bob Dylan in the indie film I’m Not There, to the serial killer Jean-Baptiste Grenouille in Perfume, and more recently to stubborn husband Sonny Watts in Suffragette and to Danny on the BBC1[nope, BBC2!] thriller miniseries London Spy. But the true mark of both his range and his intangible allure seeping further into the mainstream was his casting as Q in the Bond films Spectre and Skyfall, and the upcoming A Hologram for a King, opposite Tom Hanks. His varying characters make clear he slips easily into someone else’s skin.
When asked how he found John Proctor (he says it wasn’t a physical discovery of a walk or specific vocalization like other roles he’s played), he points to van Hove and to the high school drama teacher who first guided him in the role at age 15. He mentions a book of mug shots he found in a West Village shop: “They’ve just got this sort of stripped-down quality,” he says of the men. “They’re very pure. Startled, like they’ve been caught.” He praises his co-star, saying, “Sophie does this brilliant thing where she’ll go, ‘Can we just sit down and paraphrase this scene, ’cause I don’t understand?’ ” And Miller for creating someone so surprisingly familiar.
“It’s something I feel in my own life,” he says, “John’s frustration, you know? I think that’s something Miller writes a lot about, having this social face and then a private self. Maybe everyone feels that, but as an actor you feel that in a sort of strange, intense way because you’re in public.” He pauses with his head in his hand. Sitting up, he says, “I wish I were… I had more courage to be more outspoken about certain things, or feel less need to conform to certain things. It’s bizarre, these kinds of pressures that inform your life, your behavior. Sometimes you look at them coldly and think, What am I doing? But nonetheless, it’s deeply ingrained.”
The pressure to be an open book with his personal life is something Whishaw has avoided. Anonymity is key, he’s said in past interviews. “As an actor, your job is to persuade people that you’re someone else. So if you’re constantly telling people about yourself, I think you’re shooting yourself in the foot.”
It goes hand in hand with his aversion to the pursuit of fame over compelling art. “I think there can be an awful, heavy pressure to look a certain way, or be a certain thing,” he says. “Or fame. You could think that that’s what’s important when it’s not, really—at least it’s not for me, and it isn’t for most people I admire.”
But celebrity, whether sought or not, is a mercurial byproduct of such immense talent. If Whishaw’s current record of stage, television, and film roles are anything to go by, it’s a march toward the inevitable.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
THECRUCIBLEINTERVIEWBEN WHISHAW
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d1o8QIZeb4[/youtube]
Published on Mar 21, 2016
Broadway.com
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjySeOELzQA[/youtube]
Published on Mar 21, 2016
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.vogue.com/13419528/saoirse-ronan-ben-whishaw-the-crucible-broadway/
Saoirse Ronan
and
Ben Whishaw
Bring New Dimension
to The Crucible
by ADAM GREEN
MARCH 31, 2016 6:00 AM
Ben Whishaw in a Gucci coat and Saoirse Ronan
in a Carolina Herrera dress.
Photographed by Mel Bles, Vogue, April 2016
Ben Whishaw and Saoirse Ronan play foes and former lovers in Ivo van Hove’s Broadway revival of The Crucible.
If you are in the market for revelatory—and pulse-quickening—productions of plays that you thought you knew all too well, then the Belgian director Ivo van Hove is your man. On the heels of his devastating staging of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, van Hove returns to Broadway this month with his take on The Crucible, Miller’s thinly veiled allegory about the 1950s Communist witch hunts, set against the actual 1690s Salem witch hunts, featuring music by Philip Glass and an A-plus cast led by Ben Whishaw and, making her professional stage debut, Saoirse Ronan.
After an early Crucible rehearsal, I catch up with Whishaw and Ronan. Perhaps best known for his role in the BBC’s fifties-set newsroom show The Hour, the 35-year-old British actor had an action-packed fall, with roles in Spectre, The Danish Girl, and the television series London Spy. But like a lot of British actors of his generation, Whishaw got his start on the stage, with a breakout performance as Hamlet in Trevor Nunn’s 2004 production at the Old Vic, and most recently appeared in the West End’s Peter and Alice, opposite Dame Judi Dench. As it happens, he first took on the role of the flawed but morally courageous John Proctor in a school production when he was fifteen. “It’s a play that schoolchildren understand, somehow, because it’s about a microcosm, isn’t it?” says Whishaw, sporting a ploughman’s beard for the role. “And people ganging up and bullying and hysteria.” Although he went against physical type in casting the slight Whishaw—Broadway’s last John Proctor was Liam Neeson—van Hove was more interested in the actor’s ability to bring many dimensions to the character: “You feel that there’s a secret world in his mind, in his body, and you never know where he will go.”
As Abigail Williams, a vindictive seventeen-year-old who destroys lives with her false accusations, Ronan is revisiting territory she explored in her Oscar-nominated breakthrough in Atonement as Briony, a vindictive thirteen-year-old who destroys lives with her false accusations. Coming off her nuanced (and also Oscar-nominated) portrayal of an Irish immigrant torn between two suitors in Brooklyn, the 21-year-old Ronan is looking forward to “the commitment and the stamina” required by the stage. When we first meet Abigail, it’s been seven months since she was thrown out of Proctor’s house, where she had been a servant, because his wife, Elizabeth (Sophie Okonedo), discovered that they’d been having an affair. “He’d taught her everything she knows about the world, made her feel for the first time important for who she was,” Ronan says. “And I think she wants to feel powerful and needed the way she did with him.”
Adultery, sorcery, mob hysteria: van Hove, who has a gift for making plays feel both timeless and uncannily of the moment, believes that audiences will find all kinds of ways into Miller’s material: “I think this play perhaps works even better now that it can be liberated from the McCarthy era—it speaks more about ourselves these days than perhaps we’d like to admit.”
Sittings Editor: Sonny Groo
Hair: Teiji Utsumi; Makeup: Florrie White
--- Quote ---
http://www.vogue.com/13366399/saoirse-ronan-brooklyn/
Saoirse Ronan
Goes From Child Star
to Grown-Up in
Brooklyn
by PATRICIA GARCIA
OCTOBER 30, 2015 12:47 PM
Photographed by Angelo Pennetta, Vogue, March 2014
At 21, Saoirse Ronan already has the sort of enviable career many actors spend decades trying to achieve. Her first major role, in Atonement, earned her an Oscar nomination when she was only 13 years old. Instead of going down a perilous child-actor path, Ronan went on to build an impressive body of work, collaborating alongside directors like Peter Jackson and Wes Anderson, and next year she’s even tackling Chekhov in the upcoming film adaptation of The Seagull.
Yet one could argue her latest film, Brooklyn, based on the Colm Tóibín novel of the same name, will reintroduce audiences to a decidedly grown-up Saoirse Ronan. (In case you’re wondering, her name is pronounced Seer-sha, like inertia.) Directed by John Crowley, Brooklyn tells the story of Eilis, a young Irish woman who immigrates to New York in the ’50s. At first, Eilis struggles to adapt to a life in America, but that all changes after she falls in love with a young Italian boy (played by the charming Emory Cohen), and later is torn between staying in her newfound home or returning to the country she once pined for so deeply.
Ronan shares a very similar story to her on-screen character. She was born in New York to immigrant parents, who moved to the United States after a major recession hit Ireland in the ’80s. Her family eventually returned when Ronan was 3 years old, and despite growing up there, the actress always felt a strong connection to her birthplace. “To read something like this that is made up of the two places that essentially are in my DNA, it just felt perfect,” Ronan explained by phone from Los Angeles this week. “Brooklyn [and I] had both kind of been waiting for each other.”
When she was 19, Ronan decided to move to London by herself. And while she had the benefit of Skype and email to keep in touch, Ronan still felt deeply homesick during her time in England. “I really missed the people. I think we actually take for granted how friendly we are,” she said. “I also missed my mammy’s food.” A few months into her newfound independence, she started filming Brooklyn and was surprised at how much Eilis’s journey mirrored her own offscreen coming-of-age. “I had never had that before, where emotionally I was in the same place as somebody I was playing,” she said. “I guess it just kind of meant that there was nowhere to hide, so that made it all the more terrifying to do.”
Ronan had always planned for London to be a stepping-stone before moving to her dream city. “For me, I always wanted to end up in New York,” she said. “I had such a strong connection to the city straightaway. I instantly connected with it and loved it and got so much of a buzz from when I visited, and even still do.” She will finally be moving to the West Village in January, and the following month she’ll begin rehearsing for her Broadway debut as Abigail Williams in The Crucible. “I’m petrified,” she said with a nervous laugh. As of now, the Arthur Miller revival has a number of high-profile names attached to it: Scott Rudin is producing, Ben Whishaw and Sophie Okonedo will play John and Elizabeth Proctor, Tavi Gevinson will take on the role of Mary Warren, and Philip Glass will provide the score.
While Ronan has almost 20 movies under her belt, Brooklyn is the first one in which she had the chance to speak in an Irish accent. Although, as she explains, her Dublin one is different from “the more country accent” she used for Eilis. “I actually find that accents really help me to get into the mind-set of the character,” she said. “It’s the very first thing I think about when I take on a role. I’m already thinking about what [Abigail’s] voice should sound like.” As of now, she has no idea what she’s going to sound like onstage, so she’s thinking of watching the 1996 film adaptation of The Crucible, starring Winona Ryder and Daniel Day-Lewis, for some pointers. “I would hate to just do a modern American,” she added, before seamlessly transitioning into California-girl uptalk: “I’m a witch . . . Shut up!”
Brooklyn, which first premiered at Sundance to rave reviews, has already attracted Oscar buzz, most of which is focused on Ronan’s performance. “I grew up an awful lot. I could actually see it happening,” she said. “To have to completely rely on yourself and be self-dependent is the only way you’ll ever truly let go of childhood. It’s scary and it feels like shit and I hate being a grown-up most days,” Ronan continued, “but it’s almost like your body needs to go into shock for a while in order for you to overcome it and change from it.”
So what does Ronan make of all the talk of a potential Oscar nomination this time around? “I’m not going to lie, it really means a lot, because the film means so much to me,” she said. “I’ve been working for the last 10, 11 years. My approach to work means so much more now.” The significance of attending the Oscars has also changed for her. Back in 2007, the then-preteen was unfazed by the whole experience. Instead of remembering red carpets and movie stars, Ronan best recalls how hungry she was by the ceremony’s end. “I sat there for three hours and nobody fed us!” she laughed. “Jon Stewart came around with a big bucket of licorice and he fed everyone at the interval. It was probably the best part of the Oscars.”
--- End quote ---
Aloysius J. Gleek:
This is a production that can feel somewhat cluttered, which is a strange thing for a van Hove show. But there's no denying it is a brilliant debut for Whishaw. He has magic in spades.
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/review-ben-whishaw-bewitchingly-good-crucible-38070171
Ben Whishaw
Is Bewitchingly Good
in The Crucible
By MARK KENNEDY
AP DRAMA WRITER NEW YORK
Mar 31, 2016, 8:03 PM ET
Posters for the new Broadway revival of The Crucible feature a photo of Saoirse Ronan, looking absolutely witchy as Abigail Williams. She's awfully good in it, but the real sorcery is delivered by Ben Whishaw.
The English actor is astounding in Arthur Miller's classic tale about the Salem witch trials. He plays doomed farmer John Proctor and holds nothing back, going from slightly arrogant to flustered to full-out broken over the course of the play, a master stroke by a 35-year-old making his Broadway debut.
The revival, which opened Thursday at the Walter Kerr Theatre with Dutch visionary director Ivo van Hove at the wheel, is more uneven, lacking the singular, brilliant focus of van Hove's earlier revival this season of Miller's A View From the Bridge.
Van Hove has stripped the play down and made cuts, but he's not removed most props this time. Or shoes. The action takes place in a modern but indeterminate time, with sober, black and white costumes by Wojciech Dziedzic that would look fine in the winter J. Crew catalog. The young women are dressed like schoolgirls, with gray skirts and socks.
The setting is a charmless school room with a blackboard, heavy chairs and harsh fluorescent lights, which also serves as the courtroom and Proctor's home. Old items — a boiling black pot that looks like it was swiped from a production of Macbeth — share the stage with modern coffee carafes and stirrers you'd find at any office. Philip Glass added to a soundscape that goes from choir voices to industrial hums to gentle violin music.
Ronan and Whishaw lead a cast that also includes a wonderful Sophie Okonedo as Proctor's wife, Ciaran Hinds as a truly fearsome deputy governor, Tavi Gevinson as a slippery Mary Warren, Jason Butler Harner as an unyielding reverend and Jim Norton as a feisty elderly farmer. Bill Camp is truly excellent as a church leader who, much too late, realizes what his fire-and-brimstone approach has wreaked.
Van Hove's stripped-down approach does starkly illuminate the paranoia and descent into madness as a small town turns on itself. But the director also seems to put his thumb on the side of sorcery, with a scene of a girl hovering in the air, storms crashing through windows and that blackboard brilliantly turning into a projection screen for swirling otherworldly symbols.
It's a curious step for a play written to expose the hollowness of the witch-hunting McCarthy era. If there is indeed witchyness afoot in Salem — and not just gossip or self-interested accusations — it seems to undercut those heading to the gallows for honor's sake.
Other showy touches include over-the-top makeup that turns the Proctors into looking like half-dead zombies at the end, and a dog that resembles a wolf appearing at the top of Act Three. At one preview, the hound clearly followed a trail of treats but then stood center stage, paused and seemed to peer into the audience, questioningly. (It was a performance better than those delivered by actors in some of the smaller roles.)
This is a production that can feel somewhat cluttered, which is a strange thing for a van Hove show. But there's no denying it is a brilliant debut for Whishaw. He has magic in spades.
Follow Mark Kennedy on Twitter at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits
Aloysius J. Gleek:
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