Category: Theater

Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis at the Royal Shakespeare Company

Big thanks go to Damian’s pal Jonsel Gourkan for tweeting the lovely picture below and inspiring today’s post.

Spot a certain ginger among a bunch of young actors playing in a celebrity football tournament around, according to Jonsel, 1995/96. Both he and Damian were playing for Royal Shakespeare Company and it is clear from the tweet that the competition on the football field was real. Well, we all know Damian knows his footie, don’t we?

So how about traveling back to mid 1990s today and talk about young Damian being as serious about theatre as he was about football? Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis at the Royal Shakespeare Company”

Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Into The Woods

This lovely picture tweeted by Michelle Blair last year shows a group of young actors that were together in the 1998 London revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods at Donmar Warehouse.

source: @MichelleBlair Twitter

Oh, yeah! Way earlier than being the big, bad wolf Henry in Wolf Hall, Damian Lewis was the Wolf in Into the Woods.  Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Into The Woods”

A Lesson in Rhetoric: Damian Lewis as Antony

To be filed in the category of “This is a guy who makes you want to go back to school”, we learned and reported (on our lovely sister site damian-lewis.com) that Damian’s version of Antony’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar, for The Guardian’s video series Shakespeare Solos, was featured in a seminar on rhetoric. This wasn’t an avenue for literary criticism or drama theory, but a newsletter on effective public speaking.

How is speaking any different from writing and reading, you may wonder? Well, there are components to classical rhetoric, when dissected, can show you what makes one speech different from another. Such an analysis would reach your brain (or at least attempt to). Alternatively, we can talk about how a speech makes you feel. Granted we’re not seeing much great oratory from our current elder statesmen, so examples are few and far between. But, there was a time, wasn’t there? In our not too distant history, when a leader spoke, it did a heart good to hear, didn’t it?

Continue reading “A Lesson in Rhetoric: Damian Lewis as Antony”

Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Pillars of the Community

The National Theatre production of Henrik Ibsen‘s Pillars of the Community with Damian Lewis and Lesley Manville as the two leads opened at the Lyttelton National Theatre on November 1, 2005 — exactly 13 years ago today!

It all starts for me when a good colleague with whom I share true love for theater asks me to name my favorite male and female stage performances in 2015. Easy. Lesley Manville in Ibsen’s Ghosts and Damian Lewis in Mamet’s American Buffalo (with Mark Strong in Miller’s A View From the Bridge as a close second). And what is it about these performances that made me fall in LOVE with them?

One word: Precision.

topperfs

Then I think about the heart-breaking performance Lesley Manville gives in Ghosts which, in fact, has brought her an Olivier Award in 2014 (I saw the play much later when it visited Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2015). I know Manville mostly from her work on big screen such as Secrets and Lies (1996), Vera Drake (2004), Another Year (2010) and Mr Turner (2014) all of which were some of my favorites in the year they were released. But I really do not know about her stage work. So I google her. And here is the first image I hit! Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis in Pillars of the Community”

Throwback Thursday to Five Gold Rings or When Damian Met Helen :D

Matt Wolf, a theater critic who interviews Damian Lewis at Times Talks London in May 2014, spends quite some time talking to Damian about each and every play he has done to date at length, well, except for one: When it comes to Five Gold Rings, Wolf mentions it briefly and as more of a personal highlight than a professional one for Damian!

Matt Wolf: “One production at The Almeida called Five Gold Rings was perhaps not that successful except that it has the woman whom you ended up marrying so I would assume it was a success in that way.”

Damian laughs: “Yeah.”

source: Getty Images

Sweet! And it goes without saying that today’s walk in memory lane will be as much about Five Gold Rings as about When Damian Met Helen 😀 Continue reading “Throwback Thursday to Five Gold Rings or When Damian Met Helen :D”