Polar Bears, 2009-2010

[Flower Child]

Daisy Miller--thank you very much for your critique of the play. I have never been very fond of professional critics and they are not always correct. I can even remember the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album being panned. We all know what happened to that. Anyway you present an honest review of the play and it's sad that none of us across the pond will be given the chance to see it with Jodhi May. It seems to me that she will never come here to perform on the stage or do a Hollywood produced movie where she may have to temporarily relocate. . I do believe that she traveled to North Carolina to make the Last of the Mohicans but that's it. I feel that she gives her best to every role she assumes but unfortunately some of the films she has worked on have not been well acclaimed. She is a very multi faceted actor and at almost 35 years old she is a virtual unknown in the USA considering she has been acting for about 23 years.

[Daisy Miller]

Thank you Flower Child- Indeed she remains relatively unknown in the US but to be honest, sometimes I think she wants it that way (not just in the US but also in the UK given her reticence to give personal interviews.) And you never know, I think in a certain interview she was reluctant to dismiss the possibility of working in Hollywood...

[Katy]

I don't have a lot to add to this exchange, but I did want to add that JM filmed in LA for Signs&Wonders. And she is very often traveling to film. Many of her films are shot in other than UK locations. She has been to Africa several times to film, India, Poland a number of times, France, even Hungary. So, I would not be so quick to mark against 'travel for work' in terms of her criteria. But it does seem reasonable to assume she doesn't travel very often to the US in order to film.

I can also understand Flower Child's desire for JM to receive the accolades and acknowledgment she think she deserves. But I fall on the side of "it's just as she would have it" as Daisy Miller is. There is evidence that when JM wants to expend some of her energy promoting a project, then she does. We saw it a lot in 2006 when Blackbird was on the stage and Friend & Crocodiles was on television. And, we are seeing it again now, with Polar Bears. We also saw quite a bit for Flashbacks of a Fool and Defiance, for which she attended several premieres and walked the red carpet.

I've been a long time fan, so I have no relative measure of her appeal -- just blinded by my own bias. I don't know what other people would find appealing. I cannot say that her appeal for me is just cinematic, I'll be honest about that. Early on, I identified very much with her character 'Molly Roth' in AWA and have since really respected her approach to her career. And, she obviously does have talent. So, it's a lot of things for me. And, as a long time fan, I've learned to allow her to do what she does. What that means to me is that she doesn't always do things I like, or she commits to projects for which I don't even have an inkling of interest. But I am always interested to see what she makes of it and how she transforms those things. I think I would have abandoned ship long ago if I didn't approach her career in this way. -- Flower Child, you will see if you do read many of our discussions that this group tackles the concept of fandom quite regularly. I tend to consistently follow what I have just outlined for you. Having said that, I do remember a time when there was little separation in my mind between 'Molly Roth' and Jodhi May. I was very anxious about it.

Anyway, I've been a little stirred about the reviews being so mixed about Polar Bears. And, no, I don't always think theater critics (or film critics or literature critics) know what they are talking about. I pretty much read everything critically. But if you read enough, you can begin to assemble some commonly held ideas about the production. In this case, I haven't read enough to do that.

What has been interesting to know about this production is that they rehearsed it in chronological order and then re-built in the sequence it was written. I really did want to go, but as I was starting a new job it just didn't seem right... I hope I will have another opportunity. I did it for Blackbird and have never regretted it.

Katy

[Katy]

Another review from Variety.com.

And the Wall Street Journal.

Katy

[Flower Child]

I hope Polar Bears continues it's run as it would be a shame if they folded up early due to the critics' non-enthusiastic reviews. btw I am so glad JM let her hair grow back, eliminated the fringes and dumped the dark brown dye. Her changed appearance really made her look like another person. I also hope she stays with the long, copper brown hair as she looks great that way.

[Katy]

oh, this is a very nice interview....

Jodhi May On ... Haddon's Polar Bears
Date: 22 April 2010

Jodhi May is currently starring opposite Richard Coyle in Mark Haddon's debut play Polar Bears at the Donmar Warehouse.

She plays Kay, a woman suffering from a psychological condition who is married to John (Coyle). When the moon is in the right phase, Kay is magnetic and amazingly alive. But when the darkness closes in, she is lost to another world, a world in which John does not belong...



Writer Mark Haddon is best known for his award-winning novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which is told through the eyes of a teenager with Asperger syndrome.

May made her screen acting debut aged 12 in 1988 anti-Apartheid drama A World Apart, for which she won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival. Since then, she has appeared in a broad range of film, TV and theatre, with credits for the latter including Blackbird (Edinburgh International Festival and Albery Theatre), The Seagull (Edinburgh Festival Theatre), The Talking Cure (National Theatre), Far Away (Theatre Des Bouffes) and Platonov (Almeida at King’s Cross).

The play
It's quite difficult to describe what Polar Bears is about. What I can tell you is that it doesn’t happen in any kind of chronological order – though we rehearsed it in chronological order. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of fragmented scenes that the audience have to connect to make a whole.

The play is about a woman who (you think) has a mental disorder. You see what it's like to experience the extreme highs and lows that constitute Kay’s life, and how this shapes those close to her. The intention of the play is to create a sense of psychological reorientation. It's a really original, incredibly beautiful piece of writing that challenges theatrical conventions, as well as being a very moving and powerful story. And Jamie (Lloyd) is brilliant at mining a text’s possibilities - the writer and director are a perfect combination.

Polar Bears asks the question: what is madness? It opens that question out and tries to examine it from the perspective of how we define it and how difficult and subjective that process of definition is. Madness can be an extraordinary elevation in how you perceive the world: it’s a gift as well as a curse in terms of Kay’s experience.

Mark Haddon
There are certainly connections between Polar Bears and Mark’s novels. Not just in the sense that they are about mental illness, but in the way that he plays about with the medium. In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark redefines the landscape of the novel, and in Polar Bears he attempts something similar with the landscape of the play.

The architecture of The Curious Incident… was seen through the prism of the boy’s condition of autism. It is, tonally, very rich and extremely varied; comedy to tragedy and everything in between. Mark has a very witty way of looking at dark subjects. It's quite an adult fairytale, and I think he has that paradoxical sense of childhood fantasy being imbued with something quite macabre. The wit and humour of the play’s dark subtext is great and really pulls you in: humour is a brilliant device in that respect.

The play doesn’t set out to readdress misconceptions regarding mental illness. It is actually incidental in some ways that Kay has this condition – or this possible condition. The play is much broader: it encompasses the nature of love and relationships and asks more far-reaching questions than trying to redress our perception of madness. What Mark does brilliantly is allow you to perceive the world through this enhanced, or possibly distorted, prism.

Career to date
Acting was pretty much by accident - a happy accident though! A casting agent came to my north London state school and I was spotted to take the role of Molly in Chris Menges’ A World Apart. Acting was, strangely enough, not a childhood ambition. I got my Cannes award which got the ball rolling before I had time to think if I wanted to go to drama school. Instead, I got a place at Oxford University to read English. Doing a degree certainly helped me in terms of forensic textual analysis. It's great to have that ‘eye’ to examine a text. However, acting is not necessarily a cerebral intellectual pursuit, and it's important to concentrate on the instinctual process.

Jamie (Lloyd) and I met about a year ago. I remember seeing the Pinter plays (The Lover / The Collection) Jamie did with Richard Coyle and thinking they were absolutely brilliant …I thought I must work with this man! It’s very exciting when you see something and it just blows you away – this doesn’t happen very often. That is how you have to feel about plays like this: it is so demanding that you have to feel incredibly passionate about it. So to be working with them both now is a dream.

Working at the Donmar
The Donmar is an excellent theatre, an amazing, unusual chamber space. I don’t find its intimacy daunting, though I am conscious that an actor needs to calibrate for the space that he or she works in. However, for me, I think more in terms of the writing rather than the venue; where a play is produced is a secondary consideration.

We are very lucky in London to have such a rich theatre industry. I don’t think British theatre is ‘stuck’, I think we're in a golden age.

Looking ahead
There is nothing for me in the pipeline I’m afraid…Always a case of seeing what comes! I think it is a terrible tendency for an actor to anticipate ‘the next thing’; it is liberating and exhilarating to just enjoy what is in the moment. You can’t plan…it can sometimes undermine what happens in the present. I feel extremely lucky to have the career that I have got. I feel incredibly privileged to work with the people that I have. Basically, as long as I get to do work that I am passionate about then I'm happy!

Polar Bears, which also features Celia Imrie, David Leon and Paul Hilton, continues at the Donmar until 22 May 2010.

[Flower Child]

Today was the last day of the Polar Bears run at the Donmar. I wonder what JM will be doing tomorrow. She probably won't get a good night's sleep until she has the next project on her agenda.