The Metro

“The material is so engrossing and the performance so compelling, it all works beautifully.”

Wednesday 5th September, 2001

Marcy Lafferty’s wonderful one-woman play is a biography of Vivien Leigh, largely using her own words, presented in the form of a dream-like press conference at which she recalls and relives the most significant moments of her life. Lafferty herself plays Leigh and does an excellent job at suggesting her energy, her passion and her vulnerability – and Denise Esposito’s make-up gives her an uncanny resemblance to the screen legend. The play charts Leigh’s story from her birth in India in 1913, through her first marriage to barrister Leigh Holman, her early stage successes, her life with Larry Olivier, her famous screen roles and her increasingly severe manic depression and ill health. (The play is set in 1960, seven years before her death.) There are some hugely entertaining anecdotal sequences along the way concerning the filming of Gone With The Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire, and the characters of Brando, David O Selznick and George Cukor are conjured up in a few deft strokes.

Theatrically there are no twists; once the chronological “press conference with flashback” format is established, it isn’t changed. But the material is so engrossing and the performance so compelling, it all works beautifully.

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