Damian Lewis Says New Role Ideal for Era of Brexit and Trump – April 6, 2017

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Damian Lewis Says New Role Ideal for Era of Brexit and Trump

by Jill Lawless – Associated Press – April 6, 2017

Source: The Goat Play and AP

LONDON (AP) — British actor Damian Lewis says his latest role as a man in love with a goat is perfect for our unsettled times.

The “Homeland” and “Billions” star is back on the London stage in Edward Albee’s “The Goat, Or Who is Sylvia,” a tragicomedy about a successful, happily married architect whose sudden passion for a farmyard animal has devastating consequences.

A verbally dazzling, emotionally draining exploration of love and the limits of tolerance, the play’s new London production drew laughter and shocked gasps from its opening-night audience Wednesday.

After the show, Lewis said the play suits a time when “we feel generally more uncertainty and more absurdity in our politics at the moment, both here and in the U.S.”

“And this is a play where something drops out of the blue sky that’s utterly shocking, that’s unexpected and it causes great uncertainty and not a little trauma through the course of the play,” he said.

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West End Review: ‘The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?’ With Damian Lewis, Sophie Okonedo – April 6, 2017

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West End Review: ‘The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?’ With Damian Lewis, Sophie Okonedo

by Matt Trueman – Variety – April 6, 2017

THE GOAT by Edward Albee, Directed by Ian Rickson, Designed by Rae Smith. The Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, UK – 2 March 2017 – Credit: Johan Persson

A married, middle-aged man falls in love with a goat. Edward Albee’s set-up might be simple, but it’s perfectly positioned – silly and shocking and, at its best, achingly sad. “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” deserves far better than Ian Rickson’s stagey production starring Damian Lewis and Sophie Okonedo, which plays the joke ahead of the emotional truth. As such, a play that should feel like a brain glitch, one that tap dances over all manner of taboos, emerges instead on an even keel, too level-headed by half. Albee’s tragicomedy throws every convention into question. Rickson and his cast cling to them for dear life.

At a moment of crumbling liberal consensus, uncertainty raging like a wildfire, “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” is all too pertinent. Martin (Lewis) is a world-renowned architect, long happily married to a bright, breezy woman (Okonedo). They’re perfect bourgeois liberals, an interracial couple with a gay teenage son (newcomer Archie Madekwe). Their brownstone, in Rae Smith’s design, is a bastion of good taste — Eames chairs and exposed brickwork, a Bauhaus book on the floor. Martin’s just turned 50. He’s a bit out of sorts. And he’s taken up with a goat named Sylvia. They’re in love.

Lewis makes abundantly clear that Martin means no malice and poses no threat. He’s an unworldly, sweet-hearted soul, as helpless as he is harmless. He’s almost too soft for society, an intellectual naïf whose wife steers him through life. Right now, he’s unable to recall simple names or dates, and greets his oldest friend (Jason Hughes) like a familiar face he can’t quite place. It’s as if his brain’s been rebooted. When Lewis pulls up a chair, it’s like he’s forgotten how to sit down. Everything, in other words, is up for grabs.

Continue reading West End Review: ‘The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?’ With Damian Lewis, Sophie Okonedo – April 6, 2017

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Damian Lewis and Sophie Okonedo Discuss Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? – Jan 20, 2017

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Damian Lewis and Sophie Okonedo discuss Edward Albee’s ‘The Goat, or who is Sylvia?’

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Backstage Secrets of American Buffalo: ‘We’re acting out hidden desires’ – April 11, 2015

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Backstage secrets of American Buffalo: ‘We’re acting out hidden desires’

Damian Lewis, John Goodman and Tom Sturridge tell Mick Brown why they’ll be grappling with ‘primal issues of manhood’ in a new revival of the David Mamet classic

By Mick Brown – The Telegraph – 11 April 2015

Band of brothers: Damian Lewis, John Goodman and Tom Sturridge in rehearsal for the London revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo Photo: Jenny Lewis

It is a week into rehearsals for the new production of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, and the play’s three actors, John Goodman, Damian Lewis and Tom Sturridge, have been getting to know each other. They have been to lunch. They have been playing poker. (Who won, I ask? “Becca,” says Sturridge ruefully, referring to the production’s youthful assistant stage manager, who has been ruthlessly cleaning them all out.) And, of course, there have been long and earnest discussions about the text.

“There are few things that are more revealing about someone than the way that they talk about a piece of literature or a play,” Sturridge says. “You very quickly come to have a much deeper understanding of someone than you would if you just mingled together in a pub saying, ‘All right, how are you?’ Very quickly we were talking in an intimate way about how people feel.”

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This American Platoon is Led by a Brit, Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2000

On August 20, 2000October 8, 2017 By Damianista Comments Off

Damian Lewis survived a slew of tests to win the role of a war hero.

by DAVID GRITTEN, Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2000

HATFIELD, England — “I’ve really screwed up my hearing,” grimaces Damian Lewis. “I should have had earplugs in.”

The mud-spattered Lewis, in a World War II paratrooper uniform, has spent the morning shooting blanks (24 for each take) from an M-1 rifle at a crowd of extras dressed as German soldiers.

It is a deafening business, and everyone else on set either wears earplugs or covers their ears whenever director Tom Hanks yells “action!” Continue reading This American Platoon is Led by a Brit, Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2000

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Hamlet: Swordplay the Serious Way, New York Times, July 2, 1995

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Hamlet: Swordplay the Serious Way

By Matt Wolf, theater critic and journalist in London, New York Times, July 2, 1995

LONDON— “A HIT, A VERY PALPABLE HIT!” cries the courtier Osric during the climactic duel of “Hamlet.” And in the Broadway production now at the Belasco Theater, those hits are palpable indeed.

Productions of “Hamlet” are often distinguished by verse speaking or physical design. Jonathan Kent’s current staging, imported from the Almeida Theater Company in London, offers an additional virtue in the face-off between Hamlet (played by Ralph Fiennes) and Laertes (Damian Lewis). Beginning on a white rectangular fencing mat, the fight soon spills beyond it, weaving among the chairs of Claudius’s dismayed court as the two combatants become increasingly fevered.

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Who Will Be The New Ralph Fiennes, The Next Hugh Grant? – Jan 1, 1995

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Who Will Be The New Ralph Fiennes, The Next Hugh Grant?

By Matt Wolf – New York Times – January 1, 1995

LONDON— NOT LONG AGO, DANIEL Day Lewis and Kenneth Branagh were the British names on everyone’s lips when it came to actors; more recently, Hugh Grant and Ralph Fiennes have dominated Hollywood’s imagination. Which raises the inevitable question: Who among current British actors are poised to become the next Hugh Grant and the next Ralph Fiennes?

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