As Racine on TV

Editor’s note: Last month, London’s National Theatre kicked off an ambitious new initiative. Called NT Live, the program aims to bring productions to far-flung audiences via filmed performances. For the pilot project, it’s chosen Jean Racine’s Phèdre, starring Helen Mirren in the title role. The June 25 performance was captured in high-def and broadcast live to theaters worldwide. The exclusive Chicago screening of Phèdre is Monday 13 at 7:30pm at Steppenwolf, which has a long-standing relationship with the National Theatre. Time Out London’s Caroline McGinn recently sat down with Dame Mirren, the London native whose career honors include four Emmys, two Golden Globes, two Tony noms and an Oscar for The Queen (2006), and Nicholas Hytner, who’s been widely credited with revitalizing the National since his appointment as its director in 2003.

Time Out Chicago: Do you feel nervous about simultaneously performing for a cinema audience and a live audience?
Helen Mirren: I do. People often ask me whether I prefer theater or film, and the answer is that I prefer the one I’m not doing—the grass is always greener. But here I finally get to do both at the same time. There is no essential difference between them. You’re imaginatively putting yourself into a situation and telling a story. The tools are different. And that’s where the challenge is: finding a tool that can speak to the audience out there but not look weird to the audience out here. My instinct at the moment is—because live broadcasts are something the New York Met has done—to go with the operatic element.

Nicholas Hytner: These will not be movies. You’re going to see a play—broadcast live. It’s the live-ness for me that makes the difference. The audience over the country and the world will see Helen in a National Theatre production rather than a Helen Mirren movie.

TOC: Do you have to alter the stage movement—more lines delivered to camera and so on?
Nicholas Hytner: With the actors, we’re paying no attention whatsoever to the filming—it’s not even at the back of our minds now. We will have proper camera rehearsals so we can work out the best way of capturing the theater experience for a cinema audience. We’re not going to try to make a movie.

Helen Mirren: That’s absolutely important. Otherwise, it’s neither fish nor fowl. I’ve always found as an actress that the best thing to do in film or TV or theater is just to lose yourself in it. Think of the story, the character, the worlds we’re in—and forget everything else.

Nicholas Hytner: With Racine, there are great blocks of thought and feeling. The French call these blocks tirades. It’s necessary for the person who is silent to know why they are silent. It’s not obvious material for the camera, but it is great material. The misapprehension is that Racine’s static, but it’s emotionally so febrile. So volatile.

Helen Mirren: It’s so fabulously extreme. The form is different. The “you say something, I say something, you reply” structure doesn’t apply. Here you walk on and…tirade. I’d always read about Sarah Bernhardt playing the role. The description of her entrance. What brought me partially into wanting to do this was reading about Sarah Bernhardt and those great actresses of the 19th century. I got very romantically caught up in the idea of that. The grandness of it.

Nicholas Hytner: It’s the part that all serious French actresses have to play. In our theater, the part is for an actor, and it’s Hamlet. In French theater, it’s for an actress, and it’s Phèdre.

TOC: Is it important to you that the National Theatre is broadcasting events so much farther than the South Bank [neighborhood]?
Nicholas Hytner: It’s going to all sorts of places that aren’t big enough to be toured to. Or internationally, which are too expensive to tour to. So many theaters have got the right technology now.

Helen Mirren: Of course, pubs do, too. Perhaps we should be going out to all the sports pubs? Why not? Tuesday night, one night only. Forget the fucking World Cup. Helen Mirren in Phèdre instead. Seriously, though, it’s fantastic that there’s an appetite for it internationally. I hope and I think that, vice versa, there would be an appetite in Britain to see Croatian theater. There is incredible work being done in Copenhagen, Croatia, Italy, France. We so rarely get the opportunity of seeing it.

Nicholas Hytner: I would hope that, if this works, it will start a whole movement of exchange. Our biggest audience is in Anglophone countries, but I’ve been surprised by how many non-English-speaking countries have wanted it. There’s an audience here who’d want to see European theater, too.

TOC: Phèdre’s a very intense role: a woman in the grip of an erotic breakdown. Is it hard to leave her in the rehearsal room?
Helen Mirren: It’s very easy to lose her. I go home, watch Nothing to Declare on TV, which I absolutely love. It’s a reality show about immigration and customs in Australia. It’s fabulous. The perfect Phèdre antidote.

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