This website is dedicated to the talented and beautiful British actress Rachael Stirling, star of film, TV, stage and radio.
This isn't a full update, but I just wanted to post quickly to say that I've added a new music video to the site. I decided I'd have a go at making a Nan and Flo (Tipping the Velvet) video, as Claire made a couple of Nan and Kitty ones a while ago.
Please let me know what you think if you watch it! 
A proper, full update should be coming within the next few days.
One character may talk loudest, but all have their say.
While the Royal Court's been celebrating 50 years of the English Stage Company's new plays policy with Tom Stoppard, Bath Theatre Royal's having the play which started the ESC's ball rolling in 1956, the voice of the discontented young, John Osborne's Look Back In Anger. There's been so much revisionism going on, it's hard to remember sometimes this play was a shock to the theatrical and social systems in the mid-fifties. Certainly not the kind of thing Bath's stately Theatre Royal would have seen as its remit. Apart from the Angry Young Man journo-tag linked to the play, its Midlands bedsit setting made it the par excellence 'kitchen-sink play', though it's clear from the script the Porters' flat contains everything but the kitchen sink.
The revisionism started with Osborne himself who, within a year of its opening was calling it old-fashioned (usefully thereby advertising that his next play, The Entertainer was very new in shape, though it now seems full of quarter-absorbed Brechtianisms in its staging). At least 2 of the old-fashioned qualities are strengths: Osborne's willingness to write sustained scenes and his ability to give all his characters a genuine voice.
This is clear if they're considered without the motormouth protagonist Jimmy Porter, especially when the play's as strongly performed as in Peter Gill's revival for Bath's 2006 Peter Hall Company season (where it sits adjacent to Hall's revival of the other innovative newcomer to the 1955/56 London theatre season,Waiting for Godot. The third major event in that remarkable fifties year was the Berliner Ensemble's London season, which might well have sparked Osborne's formal experiments with his next play).
Though any young man in 2006 looks curious smoking a pipe (a fogeyish habit that's the toughest thing any Jimmy must contend with), Richard Coyle provides the pain under the anger, the genuineness of feeling and naivety of this heroic anti-hero. He doesn't quite manage the sympathy to support the privilige the play gives Jimmy's feelings. People often want his upper-class, much-abused wife Alison to chuck the famous iron at him. Here you want someone to tell him they don't care about his friends any more than he does about there's. There again, their lack of such passion is the play's point. It just doesn't seem too convincing nowadays.
Richard Harrington makes a fine Cliff, just the type to spend his time in a friend's room, and catch the warmth of others' lives rather than strike out alone. Occasionally, Harrington seems in another world when some visual response is required: in Jimmy's 'pusillanimous attack on Alison, or his declaration he'd like her to have a child die. Otherwise, he is utterly convincing.
As is Ronald Pickup, as an ex-Indian army officer come to return his daughter Alsion to her suave conventional life. Though his regret is another form of defence against strong emotion Pickup gives it a solid base in Colonel Redfern's regretful realisation life has moved on.
But Gill's main success is with the women in Jimmy's life. Too often, that's all they are. Here, they become independent people. Mary Stockley's alabaster Alison, pale in skin as in temperament, an English white rose dressed in tasteful pastel colours, has feeling and intelligence but has never been taught to use them. And Rachael Stirling's contrastingly dark-hued and haired Helena is magnificent, both in her use of direct attack against Jimmy (contrasting the others' evasiveness) and close calculation of how to seduce him.
The sense of independent individuals is increased by Gill's device of emphasising key speeches as soliloquies, underscored by sustained musical notes, with other characters leaving the room. This is a vital production; let's hope someone will ensure it can be seen after it's brief time in Bath.
Peter Hall certainly has a good eye for an evocative anniversary. Last year in Bath, his company served up a triumphant jubilee production of Beckett's timeless masterwork Waiting for Godot. This summer it is a revival, also 50 years on, of John Osborne's equally seminal work.
The big question mark, of course, is whether the play that slammed shut all those French windows of traditional British drawing room theatre still carries its landmark qualities half a century on. It would indeed be amazing if Osborne had remained as universal as Beckett, yet there remains a plethora of evidence in this compelling version of his authentic impact. The structure may seem rather dated now but there is no doubting Jimmy Porter's (that is John Osborne's) outpouring of heartfelt anguish at the state of both the nation and his own troubled mind.
The impressive Richard Coyle builds Osborne's anti-hero into a potent mix of fifties rebel with a cause and 21st century tortured soul, with a series of genuinely moving set speeches about everything he sees as wrong in conventional society. Coyne apart, some of the most sympathetic scenes are between Mary Stockley's weary yet noble Alison and Richard Harrington's understanding 'friend caught in the middle' Cliff. Rachael Stirling makes Helena's volte face from Porter-hater to Porter-lover totally believable, while Ronald Pickup, as Alison's colonial father, benefits along with the rest of the cast from composer Terry Davies' superimposed soundtrack.
Despite the seeming revival on its streets of the multi coloured Mohican hair-cut Bath remains an extremely beautiful Georgian City with its ancient Abbey and old smooth Bathstone buildings adding a unique elegance. The Eighteenth century Theatre Royal is a perfect jewel set in its heart. Hardly the most suitable setting for John Osborne's ascerbic play! I don't think the author would have been too pleased.
Since he created the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1959 Sir Peter Hall has presented many great theatrical gems throughout the world. Now in his third summer season in Bath he has again brought a fine repertoire of acclaimed plays to the Theatre Royal: Shakespeare's Measure For Measure, a new version of Strindberg's Miss Julie by Frank McGuinness, Habeas Corpus by Alan Ben and currently in it's fiftieth anniversary year, the play that changed the face of British Theatre forever, Look Back In Anger, followed by a revival of last year's great success Becket's Waiting For Godot, which runs from Tuesday 5th September until Saturday the 9th.
Set in William Dudley's slightly overpowering stage design with its huge red brick Victorian chimney and elaborate terracotta roof designs the play looked somewhat diminished in the attic room below, whether this was the cause of the diminished venom in the rantings of Richard Coyle's Jimmy Porter it would be difficult to tell. This was a clear and committed performance but lacking the caged animal frustration of this archtypical 'angry young man'.
Whilst his theatrical explosions may be exciting to watch, it is difficult to work out just what lies at the root of Osborne/Porter's frustration. At the time he wrote the play Osborne had been working as an actor for several years and clearly in that role he was not finding the creative outlet he craved. Even at the height of his success Osborne remained a tortured soul but he did not know that future when he was writing this play. Jimmy, on the other hand, appears to have no way out of his rage except through remorse and his real love, though the play does leave us uncertain about that, his wife, Alison. Mary Stockley's striking physical beauty was an obstacle in her being able to find the essential vulnerability of the character which did eventually come through very strongly in the closing, very moving moments, of the play.
Rachel Stirling's much stronger personality as touring actress Helena Charles looked, at first, as if she was going to give Jimmy the stand-up fighting he craved but once the sad and pregnant Alison had been taken back into the bosom of her middle-class family by her ex-military father, an upright yet somewhat tentative performance from Ronald Pickup, she succumbed to his awful mental terrorism.
Coming from Cardiff it was not difficult for Richard Harrington to perform the role of the 'scruffy little Welshman' who some of the time was able to keep the peace between the feuding lovers. There were well-defined performances from all the members of the cast but there was a lack of real red blood in their veins. We were given a clear account of the emotions within the play, without it being able to completely captivate our own. The production may have had two masters of theatre at the helm, producer Peter Hall and director Peter Gill but it was not quite a masterly production.
This is a music video inspired by the mini-series Tipping the Velvet, in which Rachael stars with Jodhi May. The video is dedicated to characters Nan and Flo and their relationship. It features the track Children by Robert Miles and it was created by Bonnie.
This website is dedicated to the talented and beautiful British actress Rachael Stirling, star of film, TV, stage and radio.
If you would like to see more great images of Rachael, visit the gallery.
You can also comment on most of the pages here.
Kissing another actress is no different from kissing an actor. It’s fairly mechanical. And in this, by the time you see Keeley and I kiss, you’re absolutely gagging for it to happen!
