‘Bored? You’re never good enough to get bored!’ Oscar-winner Helen Hunt on great roles, unruly audiences and her RSC debut

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The formidable actor talks about the challenge of finding meaty characters, tough times in the US – and co-starring with her dad’s hero Kenneth Branagh in The Cherry Orchard It’s lunchtime in Stratford-upon-Avon and Helen Hunt has 30 minutes to spare. She’s preparing for her Royal Shakespeare Company debut and is taking time out to speak to me via Zoom, just her head and shoulders, with what looks like a sleek-surfaced kitchen in the backdrop. Hunt is all sleek surfaces herself: polite smiles, even tones and an inscrutability so strained it makes me wonder what might be bubbling underneath. Hunt is starring alongside Kenneth Branagh and Bill Pullman in a new version of The Cherry Orchard. She plays Madame Ranevskaya, the Russian aristocrat and matriarch who returns home to find her family estate in jeopardy. The play, like so many of Chekhov’s, is about the apathy of the elite class in the dying days of the Russian empire. So why this play, for her, and why now? Continue reading... ...
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Unclenching the Fists review – claustrophobic drama full of trauma and tenderness

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A quietly phenomenal performance by Milana Aguzarova as a young woman trying to break free from the unsettling relationships within her stifling family

Like her partner Kantemir Balagov’s 2019 film Beanpole, there’s an uncanny claustrophobic charge to Kira Kovalenko’s family drama, though it finally exhales an equally powerful sigh of self-redemption. Milana Aguzarova stars as Ada, a young woman in a North Ossetian mining town trapped by her ailing and possessive father Zaur (Alik Karaev). He guards the only front door key, letting her and her siblings out when he chooses, and refuses to let her have an operation to correct injuries sustained during a school hostage-taking that mean she has to wear an incontinence nappy.

Ada’s brother Akim (Soslan Khugaev) comes home from the city of Rostov and seems to have the self-possession and moral compass Zaur does not. He promises to get her the treatment she needs – and a shot at romance with local chancer Tamik (Arsen Khetagurov), who has been hovering. But there’s an unsettling ambivalence to his help, expressed in their fraught confrontations and intense embraces; an incestuous undertone that younger brother Dakko (Khetag Bibilov), who tries to climb into Ada’s bed like a small child, is also subject to.

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