Ellen Terry With Eileen Atkins (London)
Opening Night: January 12, 2014
Closing: February 23, 2014
Theater: Shakespeare's Globe
Renowned worldwide and considered one of the finest Shakespearean actresses of the Victorian period, Ellen Terry composed Four Lectures on Shakespeare with her friend and colleague Sir Henry Irving in the early years of the twentieth century. Join award-winning actress and screenwriter Eileen Atkins as she weaves together those lectures, stories from Ellen’s life and excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays in a dazzling and lucid dramatisation. Atkins performs over ten parts including Juliet, Beatrice and Viola, and revisits the roles to shed fascinating new light on female characters who have sometimes been constued as dull, submissive or one-dimensional.
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January 28, 2014
The great Eileen Atkins, who will be 80 in June, is back on the London stage to help inaugurate the capital’s newest playhouse, the 340-seat Wanamaker, the long-awaited indoor theater at Shakespeare’s Globe. A veteran presence on both sides of the Atlantic, Ms. Atkins is appearing on her own as the Edwardian-era actress Ellen Terry in a solo evening, Ellen Terry With Eileen Atkins that runs an enchanting 70 minutes straight through.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 21, 2014
Actors are often the sharpest judges of Shakespeare: a point proved by Ellen Terry, who in 1910 started touring a series of informal lecture-demonstrations on Shakespeare’s characters. Eileen Atkins has now adapted them into a 75-minute show which offers the delirious pleasure of seeing one great actor inhabiting the mind and spirit of another.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 21, 2014
“An actress’s life is not all beer and skittles,” according to Dame Ellen Terry, the most feted actress of Victorian London. Eileen Atkins, who is playing Terry, may share this view. To play the role of a great actor must be daunting. How can you ever be as great? How can you avoid pastiche? Well, the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a magical interpretation of a Jacobean theatre, is not a bad place to try.
READ THE REVIEWJanuary 21, 2014
This is an evening touched with magic. Eileen Atkins, one of our greatest actresses, responds to the work of another, Ellen Terry (1847-1928) who performed in Shakespeare opposite Henry Irving for 25 years at the Lyceum, and played most of the great female roles. In her later years Terry wrote and presented several lectures on Shakespeare, two of them on Shakespeare’s heroines, offering some of the finest passages from the plays, and her own thoughts on the characters.
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January 26, 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.
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