Cate Blanchett as: Woman/Pamela

Directed by: Katie Mitchell
Written by: Martin Crimp (Adapted from Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela)
Play run: 16 January to 2 March 2019 (opened on 23 January 2019)
Location: National Theatre

 

 

 

Photos

Martin Crimp’s play breaks through the surface of contemporary debate to explore the messy, often violent nature of desire, and the fluid, complicated roles that men and women play. Using Richardson’s novel as a provocation, six characters act out a dangerous game of sexual domination and resistance.

Cast:

Cate Blanchett as Woman/Pamela
Stephen Dillane as Man
Babirye Bukilwa as Girl 2
Jessica Gunning as Mrs. Jewkes
Emma Hindle as Girl 1
Craig Miller as Ross

Creatives:

Set design by Vicki Mortimer
Costume design by Sussie Juhlin-Wallén
Lighting design by James Farncombe
Sound design by Melanie Wilson
Movement direction by Joseph Alford

Related Images

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Promotional; RehearsalQuotes from Cate Blanchett

• On the script: “A lot of the things the play brings up is stuff I’ve been thinking about for a long time. The boundaries of gender, how language constantly fails us and confines us, keeps us in paradigms and frameworks which are frustrating and confounding.” (The Guardian, 2019)
• On how she think the audience might respond to the play: “I always see theatre as a provocation. You’re not up there running for office, you’re asking a series of questions. Some people might be enraged, some perplexed, some people might be excited. Hopefully it’s the conversation afterwards that’s the most important.”

Quotes from Others

• Katie Mitchell:
  — “I had a tricky conceptual idea and set of parameters for how to stage the play that wasn’t embedded in its DNA. Cate [Blanchett] ran with it beyond anything I could have envisaged in terms of ideas and imagination. The German word ‘konsequent’ comes to mind – to follow ideas through to their absolute end.”
• Jessica Gunning:
  — “I acted with her [Cate Blanchett] in a play called When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other. I played a bisexual dominatrix who was in love with Cate’s character. We were engaged in an S&M game onstage, and Cate was dressed in a wedding gown. I had to put tights on her at every performance, and we had to time it with a monologue. Not easy. It was intense but amazing. Cate’s so present, so in the moment. I was a fan before, but watching her onstage was thrilling. She’s also a brilliant person, a true original.”

Selected Reviews

Excerpts from selected reviews.

• Independent — “Crimp’s dialogue, and their pin-sharp performances, are constantly mutating: Blanchett moves between a fluting, fluttering pure pastiche of the helpless little “Pamela” to a woman asserting her own power to – occasionally – glimpses of what just might be “reality”. She is brilliant: one of those simply magnetic performers, as poised as she is potent. It’s a chilly sort of play – all about surfaces, not much about the heart – but she sure makes those surfaces gleam. Every modulation, every snap between different poses or characters, is clearly defined. Dillane matches her: urbane, deceptively light, at times absurdly patronising, he sails through the material. Together, they are also very funny.”
• The Guardian — “Fortunately, the two actors are highly watchable. Blanchett has an extraordinary capacity to shift vocal and physical registers. As a woman she seems wily, guileful and undefeated: when she strokes the man’s thigh with an elegantly stockinged foot she invests the gesture with irony and even makes her fetishistic assumption of a wedding dress feel like an act of protest. But when she becomes the male tormentor, she makes expressive use of deep chest-notes without ever lapsing into vicious caricature. As we know from her previous work in film and theatre, she is a consummate actor.
  Dillane has the tougher task in that the Man, even when supposedly bossing the show, is always on the back foot. However, Dillane, with his bony features and disordered mass of greying hair, has the ability to make the male illusion of power interesting, and there is good support from Jessica Gunning as his housekeeper, who seizes on a hint in Richardson’s novel to suggest a lesbian fascination with her master’s prisoner.”
• WhatsonStage — “As for Blanchett, she puts her charisma and commitment entirely in the service of the play. You can see why it appealed. She gets to change voices, to play the master as well as the servant, the man as well as the woman. She acts submissive and dominant, cringing and powerful, beautiful and ugly. She is terrific but it isn’t enough. Despite her best endeavours – and those of Jessica Gunning, who brings real aplomb to her scenes as Mrs Jewkes, the woman who is both Pamela’s jailer and her admirer – the evening feels much longer than its two-hour running time.”
• Time Out — “Blanchett is scorchingly good when her character is bored, angry or a man: sometimes imperious and imposing, sometimes terrifying and ludicrous as she rants away in her power-drunk male guise, that retina-searing charisma cranked up to the max. Dillane is actually better, though: he can do the pompous egoistical sadist thing, but there’s always an air of desperate, pitiable weakness there. And he frequently drops into a fascinating, morose minor key that Blanchett never really comes close to replicating – she doesn’t really do subtle. His gender seems more meaningfully fluid; her masculinity feels performative.”

Trivia & Facts

• Cate Blanchett’s debut on National Theatre stage.
• Cate Blanchett has previously worked on another play adaptation, Big and Small (Groß und Klein) (2011-12), by Martin Crimp.