the essence of audrey

 Fairy Powered Productions - 4 stars

"Helen Anker’s enthralling play looks beyond the iconic imagery of that black dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and explores the real person beneath the gamine perfection.

Set in Audrey’s Swiss home – a backdrop of a cosy book filled room with an armchair, mannequins displaying gowns from her films, stacked vintage suitcases and a guitar – artefacts from her film career are being auctioned off to raise funds for UNICEF. The guest speaker hasn’t arrived, so Audrey begins talking about her life and career while we wait for his arrival.

Helen Anker’s physical resemblance to Hepburn (they both trained as ballet dancers) and her wonderful grasp of Hepburn’s vocal rhythms and tone add a little magic to her heartfelt performance. Anker’s Audrey swigs wine when she gets nervous, dances gleefully across the room as she shows off her gowns, and fumbles over words when she touches upon memories that are hard to bear. Director Michael Vivian ensures Anker’s physicality is used effectively as she moves around the small stage, dancing, singing and sipping her wine.

With such an interesting and full life, it is hard to stop a 65-minute monologue from becoming a checklist of facts, but Anker’s writing and performance creates the atmosphere of someone gradually relaxing into a public searching through and sharing of their memories and the emotions they evoke. Hepburn’s childhood and survival during WW2 in Holland had an enormous impact on her physical and emotional health, and Anker acknowledges this throughout, as well as her determination to prevent other children suffering leading her to work with UNICEF. Hepburn’s career seems to have been a string of good luck and coincidences landing her amazing roles which she then threw herself into and did her best to cope with any stress involved. Hepburn’s marriages and struggles to have children – with one shocking anecdote about 1960’s Hollywood’s disregard for the safety of actors – are considered candidly, there is juicy gossip about famous actors and directors, and sheer joy talking about her friendship with Givenchy. 

The essence of Audrey, the troubled but determined woman behind the public façade, is revealed in a natural and affectionate manner that had the audience rapt.

A fascinating and heartwarming exploration of an icon that is unmissable. Helen Anker has created that S’wonderful."

Review by Claire Roderick for Fairy Powered Productions

ReviewsGate - 4 stars

“Audrey Hepburn brought vividly to life.”

"Helen Anker has crafted a splendid one woman play in which Audrey Hepburn talks to an audience who have come to her home in Switzerland to see her collection of gowns from some her greatest roles. It is a fund raising event for UNICEF for which she was an Ambassador, a role she took very seriously. The promised host is late and Audrey must entertain the visitors. 

Anker conjures up the woman very well indeed, looks enough like her to be credible, has stories to tell about her past and even manages to sing Moon River while playing the guitar sounding just like the real thing. 

It starts with her childhood in Holland during Nazi occupation, life with a domineering mother, without a father who left them when she was six or seven and how she trained to be a ballerina. Eventually they got to London, Marie Rambert offered her a scholarship but the privations of war meant she did not have the stamina and at 5ft 7” was just too tall. But she did have a career dancing in West End shows, secured some bit parts in British films and was discovered by Colette, who decided she was Gigi and that led to Broadway and to her first film – Roman Holiday and an Oscar. After that there is a string of hit movies for years in most of which she was dressed by Givenchy and became a style icon as well as an accomplished until something starts to go wrong and she takes a break from filming for several years. We get the marriages to Mel Ferrer, to Andrea Dotti, the attempts to have children – she has a son by each of her husbands – and how she found refuge from the world of stardom in her house in Switzerland where she spent the last years of her life with her partner Robert Wolders. 

An hour in Anker’s company passes delightfully, her performance is pitch perfect, and if there was more to Hepburn then Hepburn is not telling. And there was. Her will left her estate to her two sons to be divided equally but that led to all sorts of trouble – however Audrey was not to know. 

Anker ends by urging her audience to contribute to UNICEF which seems the perfect ending to a story told from Audrey’s point of view."

Review by William Russell for ReviewsGate

British Theatre Guide

"It is all too easy to remember Audrey Hepburn for the romance of Roman Holiday, in one of those magnificent frocks from My Fair Lady or that iconic publicity image for Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Behind that glamour and fame lay a darker story, starting with growing up in war-torn Europe and working with the resistance movement. It makes Hepburn an almost perfect subject for a bio-piece, elevating it beyond a rags-to-riches or tears of a clown narrative.

Add to those advantages that the gamine (oh, how she must have tired of being described so!) Belgian-born actress had a turbulent private life with an aristocratic mother, an absentee Nazi-sympathising father and two husbands.

In lockdown, Helen Anker, who like Hepburn embarked on a career as a ballet dancer before moving across to embrace performance more widely, wrote The Essence Of Audrey, which has just had a fleeting three-performance run at The Jack Studio Theatre. Lucky you if you got to see it.

A longtime heavy smoker, Hepburn died of cancer aged 63, but there is a lot of life to fit into 60 minutes, and if there are moments that feel a little contrived, or the largely chronological narrative feels rather like a list of milestones being ticked off, these are few in number and there is never any doubt that we are hearing Audrey’s story on her terms.

On her personal life, this Audrey is more candid about the deprivations and hardships of her early life than she is on her two failed marriages, the focus of which stays more on the romantic, swept away aspects than the harsh realities, or her own dalliances.

Anker cleverly also draws from the periphery of Hepburn’s life, with Hollywood gossip about how petty and obnoxious Humphrey Bogart was on the set of romcom Sabrina, her trumped-up rivalry with Julie Andrews over My Fair Lady and her admiration for Givenchy with whose help her propulsion to status of fashion icon was assured.

I inwardly cringed at the emetic “Moon River” with struggled guitar accompaniment, but the multi-award-winning song from Breakfast at Tiffany’s won favour and applause from Thursday’s audience, and who am I to begrudge that.

Anker’s performance captures the essence of Audrey, her look, intonation and balletic grace, but also her frailty, her love of family and children and the importance of finding happiness and inner tranquility in her relationship with Rob Wolders.

It might be more appealing, or even just nostalgic, to associate Audrey Hepburn with that little black Givenchy dress and Tiffany necklace, or on the back of that Vespa with a gorgeous Gregory Peck, or perhaps her humanitarian work, but as Anker’s play shows, there was much more to her than that.

The Essence Of Audrey serves to remind us how much we miss if we fail to glance behind the cinematic glamour to see the ordinary people with insecurities and dreams like the rest of us."

Review by Sandra Giorgetti for British Theatre Guide

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