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    ‘Lyonesse,’ With Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas, Is a Starry Mess

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    In London, Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas do their best in a new play that careers between near-slapstick one minute and speechifying the next.“We dream big,” says a no-nonsense film executive early in “Lyonesse,” the starry, if overstuffed, new play that opened Wednesday night at the Harold Pinter Theater, in London. And so, too, does this West End debut from Penelope Skinner, a British playwright whose works have long enlivened small theaters on both sides of the Atlantic.The themes arrive thick and fast across nearly three hours: #MeToo, cancel culture, the tyranny of men and many others. But not even Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas, the production’s commercial draws, can transform the scattershot material into a coherent whole.It takes courage to open a new play in the West End without a previous run somewhere else, but “Lyonesse” whimpers where it should roar. You emerge less enlightened than bewildered at the inability of so much talent — including the show’s usually excellent director, Ian Rickson — to come up with something better.James shoulders the bulk of the narrative, playing Kate, an eager-beaver movie exec whose habit of continually apologizing doesn’t inspire confidence in her judgment.Her boss, Sue (Doon Mackichan), nonetheless has enough faith in Kate to send her on a mission to Cornwall, southern England, where she meets Elaine (Scott Thomas), an actress who has emerged from a decades-long hibernation and wants to tell her story on film.Doon Mackichan plays Sue, Kate’s boss, who sends Kate to Cornwall to work on a film project about a long-forgotten actress.Manuel HarlanThe women’s first encounter isn’t especially auspicious, though Elaine’s entrance certainly catches the eye. Waddling onstage in Wellington boots, a swimming cap and a fur coat worn over a swimsuit, she suggests an English seaside equivalent to Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.” She also comes bearing an ax that she’s been using to chop up furniture, and you feel from her bizarre behavior that she could put it to other uses, as well.“It is time for me to step into the light,” Elaine announces with a flourish, and at first, you think she will send Kate packing, frustrated by this new arrival’s flightiness and her inability to light a fire. Instead, the two bond over a shared desire to take ownership of their lives. Elaine is reckoning with the fallout of a brutal relationship with a now-dead film director, just as Kate, a generation younger, chafes at the control exerted by her own film director husband, Greg (James Corrigan, in the play’s lone male role).Freed from her own difficult relationship, Elaine encourages the impressionable Kate to leave Greg and start afresh. But any hope of a clean break is dashed when Sue suggests that he be hired to direct the film of Elaine’s life.Keeping an eye on these complications, and others, is Elaine’s calm neighbor and friend, Chris (Sara Powell, first-rate), a poet who develops feelings for Kate that aren’t reciprocated.Sara Powell as Chris, Elaine’s neighbor.Manuel HarlanAnd yet the play’s tone is so wayward — near-slapstick one minute, speechifying on societal ills the next — that any focus is lost. Skinner writes tremendous parts for women, as her earlier plays “Linda” and “The Village Bike” have shown. But the principal performers in “Lyonesse” are sufficiently confounded by the gear shifts in the writing that you start to look toward the gentler presence of Chris for respite. The playwright is clearly drawn to this secondary character, too, and Chris ends the play onstage alone.The likable James has an animated stage presence, but it’s hard to believe that a serious company would employ such a flibbertigibbet. Chattiness in both life and art can grate, and so it proves here.Scott Thomas looks fantastic as the willfully daffy Elaine. And as a onetime film star herself, who has enjoyed a renewed career onstage, she may understand Elaine’s desire, however misguided, to put herself in the public eye once more. The role couldn’t be further from the cool, cryptic women Scott Thomas often plays, so is a welcome change of pace.But the fact remains that the character of Elaine never rings true: She’s an amalgamation of eccentricities, most of which feel borrowed from elsewhere. For her big set piece, Scott Thomas careers about the living room of Lyonesse, her decaying house, in a wig, recounting the details of Elaine’s bruised and bruising life.But when she later poses the question, “What if I’m no longer spellbinding?,” it feels like time for the character, and the play, to face facts.LyonesseThrough Dec. 23 at the Harold Pinter Theater in London; lyonesseonstage.com. More

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      Actors Seeking Stability Turn to Directing at the Toronto Festival

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      Movies directed by actors were prominent at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Could the reasons they’re striking also underlie the career move?By my count, there are 10 movies by actor-turned-directors at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Ten. The majority, including Chris Pine’s “Poolman” and Anna Kendrick’s “Woman of the Hour,” are debuts.I don’t know how many actors choose to be filmmakers at any given moment; “what I really want to do is direct” is a cliché for a reason. But that still seems like a lot. And it is particularly noteworthy right now in Hollywood, when the strikes by the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, and the Writers Guild of America have revealed how much disparity there can be in pay and in the ownership of one’s work. Not to mention the willingness of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to make a deal with the Directors Guild of America but not the other creatives.“Actors directing films isn’t unusual,” said Cameron Bailey, the chief executive of the Toronto festival, “but we saw a larger number this year and invited several, before we got news of the strike.” Besides the Kendrick and Pine movies, actors making directorial debuts included Patricia Arquette (“Gonzo Girl”), Kristin Scott Thomas (“North Star”), Kasia Smutniak (“Walls”) and Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk (“Hell of a Summer”).Directing confers control, which confers power, which confers stability, right? At the very least, if you’re directing, you’re not left hanging around.“Everyone is hanging around,” Stacey Sher, one of the “Poolman” producers, told me. “You’re hanging around to get financing. You’re hanging around to get distribution. You’re hanging around to hope that you get a date that connects. You’re hanging around to hope that you get lucky and your campaign clicks and that you’re in the zeitgeist. You’re hanging around hoping that the press likes your movie.” Sher has been producing films for more than 30 years, among them actor-director feature debuts like “Reality Bites” (Ben Stiller) and “Garden State” (Zach Braff).In “Poolman,” for which he also served as a producer and co-screenwriter, Pine plays a Lebowski-style free spirit who ministers a decrepit apartment-complex pool by day and disrupts local council meetings by night. As a director, Pine, who has been acting for two decades, suddenly found himself answering questions about everything around the clock. Sher recalled him telling her, “‘I understand how easy I had it before, just being able to go back and study my lines and prepare and stay in character.’”Though Pine had planned to publicize “Poolman” at Toronto, his support of the strike precluded his attendance because SAG-AFTRA forbids promotions during the labor action. On opening night, Sher presented the film solo, stating: “It is a different premiere and Q. and A. then we had hoped for, but there was never a second where Chris was going to do anything but stand with SAG and the W.G.A.”Pine was returning the favor. He “knew what he wanted and what he wanted was to build a team that could support him in achieving what his goals were cinematically,” Sher said. Patty Jenkins, who had directed the actor in the “Wonder Woman” franchise, was a “Poolman” producer from the start (Ian Gotler was also a producer). Jenkins acted as “directing doula,” available for technical checks and gut checks, Sher said. Pine also worked with the “Wonder Woman” films’ cinematographer, Matthew Jensen. Directing granted him the power to surround himself with people — the kind who are currently striking — who could make his new job easier.“Poolman” was a low-budget film in which almost half of the 22 days was spent shooting in a motel where beds were removed to make way for makeshift offices and dressing rooms, adding to the camaraderie. “I think if you just want the job for control, you’re not going to do a very good job,” Sher said of directing. “The best filmmakers I’ve ever worked with are the most collaborative.”Chris Pine starred in as well as directed “Poolman,” featuring Annette Bening, left, and Danny DeVito.Darren Michaels/ABC Studios“Woman of the Hour” was an exercise in combining the right people in what Miri Yoon — one of several producers on the project along with Kendrick — likened to a kind of “math” problem. Kendrick, who was initially attached only to star, “really drove us over the line,” said Yoon, who recently worked on another major actor-director feature, “Don’t Worry Darling” from Olivia Wilde. It was the way Kendrick interpreted the Black List script by Ian McDonald — a quasi-biopic about the 1970s serial killer Rodney Alcala told through the eyes of women who crossed his path, including a “Dating Game” contestant (Kendrick) — that convinced everyone she should helm.“We’re like, well, what are we doing?” Yoon said. “Why do we even bother going through this whole dog-and-pony show trying to figure out who else can do this movie? Let’s just go.” From that moment, it went fast — about six weeks after Kendrick was tapped to direct, the crew was in prep for a 24-day shoot — and it went hard, with a Vancouver winter standing in for a Los Angeles summer. Despite all of this, the first-time filmmaker was very deliberate, Yoon said: “There’s nothing arbitrary about Anna Kendrick.”I suggested that Kendrick’s preparation might be due to the fact that she’s a woman in the director’s chair, with all the prejudices that entails. Yoon gestured that I had hit it on the nose. While almost half the actor-director films at Toronto are by women, everyone knows by now the challenges female filmmakers face behind the camera. As actress Eva Longoria recently told Variety upon the release of “Flamin’ Hot,” her feature directing debut, “I get one at-bat, one chance, work twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as cheap.”No doubt aware of this calculus, Kendrick herself announced she was “heartbroken” at not being able to attend the Toronto festival for the premiere because of SAG-AFTRA rules. While some independent films have secured interim agreements if they agree to union demands, this year’s festival has seen few American filmmakers and actors doing promotion. Despite that, “Woman of the Hour” still landed the first major sale of the festival in a reported $11 million deal with Netflix.Considering that the stability of Hollywood itself is in question, it is hard to determine whether directing confers more security than having to hang around waiting for an acting job. Neither of the producers I spoke to were able to give a definitive answer, with Yoon saying the industry was still finding its footing in “a landscape that is going through a seismic change.”Bailey, the Toronto festival chief, surmised that the lack of work around the Covid lockdowns led to an abundance of actors directing, an attempt to claim agency over their careers. “I suspect some of these actors used the opportunity of the pandemic disruption to get more personal projects made.” Indeed both Pine and Kendrick have said separately that the pandemic led them to change the way they thought about their work.Yoon did, however, agree that while producing seems to be more about business ownership, directing seems to be more about artistic ownership. She elaborated, “The film’s end result is the sum of many, many, many parts, and the fact that you get to participate in all of those parts, which, as an actor, you don’t necessarily do.”Still, Sher said she thought the reason anyone, including an actor, directs is incredibly personal. “I remember a filmmaker friend of mine said every filmmaker directs for a different value,” Sher explained. “For some people, it’s reality; for some people, it’s about precision, some people performance, some people it’s technical, some aesthetic pleasure. And the more people that are doing it, the more people also realize that it’s an option that they may never have thought that they had.” More

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      ‘Two Tickets to Greece’ Review: Advisory Travel

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      Former middle-school friends with clashing temperaments take an Aegean excursion in this contrived French fluff.In “Two Tickets to Greece,” Blandine (Olivia Côte), a depressed and divorced Frenchwoman, is pushed by her son to take a Hellenic excursion with Magalie (Laure Calamy), the middle-school best friend she lost touch with decades earlier. Magalie, now a free-spirited, impulsive music journalist, can find fun anywhere. Blandine, a buttoned-up radiology technician embittered by her ex-husband’s remarriage, seems incapable of experiencing fun at all.As teenagers, the two had planned to travel to the Greek island Amorgos, which entranced them in the 1988 movie “The Big Blue.” But when Magalie skimps on ferry tickets, the barely reunited pals wind up waylaid on a different, tiny island populated almost exclusively by archaeologists and surfers. And while Magalie will turn any location into a makeshift disco, Blandine, who refrains from a fling with a Belgian surfer, remains a stick in the Aegean mud.Calamy has by far the livelier part, and the energy dissipates whenever Magalie isn’t drawing attention to herself. When she and Blandine reach Mykonos, the movie brings aboard Kristin Scott Thomas — largely speaking fluent French — as Bijou, a hippie jewelry designer hiding from a British upper-crust background (and living with an artist played by Panos Koronis, of “The Lost Daughter” and “Before Midnight”).Bijou becomes an unofficial referee and wisdom dispenser for the central pair, as well as a facile expository device for the writer-director, Marc Fitoussi. Blandine — “bland,” per Bijou — and Magalie never totally reconcile their conflicting instincts, but “Two Tickets to Greece” is still pretty dopey and contrived, even if the scenery isn’t bad.Two Tickets to GreeceNot Rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More