“Sixty-three and on one-night stands.” Ellen Terry, the loved Victorian actor, started giving lectures on Shakespeare when her stage life was waning. Eileen Atkins, who recreates some of Terry’s talks on Shakespeare’s women in Ellen Terry With Eileen Atkins, a show first seen two years ago, does not need to resuscitate her career. Yet though she can be seen glimmering caustically in Doc Martin, and was last year starring at the RSC, it is not easy to catch her on the stage. For some of us she cannot be there often enough.
She arrives almost running. In dark blue trousers, waistcoat, floor-length coat and white frilled shirt, she is both a willowy page and a seductress. She delivers a bewitching, nonstop hour and a half of Shakespearean speeches and commentary. The border between Ellen and Eileen is permeable. Atkins begins with Terry’s memories of breaking not her leg but her foot while playing Puck as a nine-year-old, and being bribed with a promise of a doubled wage if she finished the show. Atkins herself was a child performer, known as “Baby Eileen”. Terry varied her lectures, surfing on the reactions of different audiences. Atkins makes you feel the particular thing she is doing can be only for you.
Ophelia was Shakespeare’s “only timid character”; most of the people locked up in Bedlam would not serve as models for the mad – they were “too theatrical”. Atkins brings her wit to bear on Terry’s pronouncements. She never seems to “do” an expression, but alters her attitude simply by lowering her jaw and swivelling her eyes a couple of centimetres.
Pointing out that Juliet is best played by someone who is far too old to be her, Atkins delivers the potion speech with utter conviction. No skittishness or squeaking, but a lightening of her voice, and gestures so tiny that they seem to shrink her body to that of a teenager. She is a strong Portia – and Emilia. She is, extraordinarily and wonderfully, both Lear and Cordelia. No hint of doing a turn. She simply makes father and daughter appear indissolubly bound together
• At the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London until 13 February. Box office: 020-7401 9919
