The almost complete works.
al The History
Boys
At The Wyndhams
Theatre, London, West End.
I was moved, disturbed and
exhilarated last night. Nicholas Hytner's original production makes a far
stronger impact, thanks to Stephen Moore, giving the performance of a lifetime
as an old, gay teacher. Moore's Hector, a teacher to his roving fingertips, all
ruminative in grey -green, buoyed up by irony and the pleasures of elucidating
poetry, achieves an overwhelming pathos when sexually downed and outed.
Nicholas de Jongh. The Evening Standard
Stephen Moore, nattily clad in bow tie and suede shoes,
invests Hector with a dapper solitariness. This is a man who has spent all his
life, sexually and academically, on the margins, and who loves the poets Hardy
and Larkin for their "diffidence or shyness". This makes it overpoweringly
moving when he finally breaks down in front of his class.
Michael
Billington. The Guardian.
He's best at the quiet moments - spell-binding
in the superb sequence in which Hector expounds on a Hardy poem to the troubled,
gay Posner, revealing the depth of his own loneliness and stoicism, and
transmitting subtle empathy to a pupil who looks likely to share such a fate.
Paul Taylor
- The Independent
Festen
At The Lyric Theatre,
Shaftesbury Avenue, London.
...the most remarkable performance comes from
Stephen Moore as Helge. You sense the man's furtive lust from the obscene
way he suggests the maid should bed his sexually nervous son Christian.
But Moore is at his best in the morning-after breakfast scene
in that he endows Helge with a guilt-ridden melancholia and strange
self-delusion as if the whole affair had been a private family joust.
This is acting of the highest order in a stunning production.
Michael Billington. The Guardian. |
 |
An Enemy of the People
first seen at the
Olivier at the Royal National Theatre
and subsequently at the Ahmanson Theater Los Angeles.
|
Mr. Nunn has made Stockman's relationship with his brother
the production's emotional center, and Mr. McKellen and Mr. Moore bring a deep familial
ambivalence to their scenes together that goes beyond the dichotomy of their different
moral attitudes. From the moment they first greet each other in the first act, with a
guilty wary silence before embracing, it is obvious that these two men have never learned
to deal with each other. Mr. Moore's Peter Stockman, a man who embodies the status quo of
compromise and self interest, occasionally rips open his character's traditional buttoned
up mien to reveal a welter of mixed affection and resentment.
Ben Brantley. The New York Times
The excellent Stephen Moore plays Peter Stockman, who is not only mayor, chief of
police, chairman of the board of the spa, but also Tomas Stockman's brother. His
apple cheeked, gray haired demeanor and wire rimmed glasses give him the look of a kindly
grandfather, which he uses brilliantly to hide his ruthlessness. His creeping fascism is
indeed harrowing.
Laurie Winter. Los Angeles Times
Stephen Moore is wonderful as Tomas's brother Peter. In attitude, gesture and
every other conceivable detail, Moore conveys an intolerant man used to getting his
own way.
Paul Hodgins. The Orange County Register
... the wonderfully superior, solidly bourgeois and peevishly jealous Stephen
Moore.
Robert Hurwitt. San Francisco Examiner
...a drably authoritarian bureaucrat who could pass for a Soviet commissar,
Moore's crusty embittered portrayal is every bit as impressive as McKellen's more
flamboyant turn.
Reed Johnson. L.A Daily News.
back to An Enemy of the People
A Doll's House for the Royal Shakespeare
Company, at The Pit Theatre, Barbican, London
.... his treatment of Nora is seen less as an exhibition of
male chauvinism than as an element in a huge pathetic irony: his confidence that he
possesses the secret of a shared cosy happiness turns into baffled incomprehension.
Stephen Moore plays Torvald with great emotional versatility, ranging from arrogance to
pathetic despair. He gains his effects with fine precision - an inane smile, a rasping
tone of anger, a whining sentimentality, an unctuous sentimentality....
Gareth Lloyd Evans. Drama Quarterly.
back to A Doll's House
The Alchemist at the Lyric Theatre,
Hammersmith, London.
....Subtle, the Alchemist himself is played gloriously by
Stephen Moore, looking and behaving like a slightly improbable pantomime Prospero....
Giles Gordon. Plays and Players.
back to The Alchemist
The Wild Duck for the Royal National Theatre
at the Olivier Theatre.
Stephen Moore offers a mesmerising portrait of the vain, shambling Ekdal, a man
who can stuff himself with salt-beef sandwiches while declaring his heart is
breaking. And it is one of the beauties of Christopher Morahan's production that
Ekdal is so convincingly the son of his pottering, useless old father, given a
masterly performance by Ralph Richardson.
John Barber. The Daily Telegraph. London.
The Chief virtue of the National Theatre's production of The
Wild Duck is the truthfulness with which it's leading characters, Hjalmar
Ekdal and Gregers Werle, are played by Stephen Moore and Michael Bryant. The realism of
Ibsen's concepts of these two is beyond question: anybody who has passed through life so
far without encountering people like Hjalmar and Gregers can indeed consider himself
lucky. Yet both of them must be devilishly difficult to act..... The balance is especially
commendable in Moore's interpretation of Hjalmar, a creature deplorably ineffectual, yet
able to convince himself that he is otherwise.....
Plays and Players.
back to The Wild
Duck
Peer Gynt for the Royal National Theatre at the
Olivier Theatre.
Moore plays the limpid loafer and time traveler as a
Norwegian Doctor Who, knocked into ghostly senility while peeling the onion in the coffin
of the young boy who cut off his finger to avoid the call-up. All the world's an onion -
it's enough to make you cry. The vastness of the Olivier theatre comes into it's own, as
does Moore's wonderful performance, which expands in size, ease and gesture as melt -down
beckons in the Button Molder's ladle.
Michael Coveney. The Observer. London.
..Stephen Moore's powerful portrayal of this ageing
anti-hero, where there are deep echoes of a terrible reality: of a man who has sacrificed
self in pursuit of self-interest, self-gratification and self delusion.
Moore gives us both the ruthless, rugged adventurer and the bewildered oaf, the two sides
of the coin Ibsen sends spinning in this picaresque tale of a man half Faust, half Walter
Mitty...
Jack Tinker Daily Mail. London.
back to Peer Gynt
