Welcome to The Helen Mirren Archives, your premiere web resource on the British actress. Best known for her performances with the Royal Shakespeare Company, "Prime
Suspect" and her Oscar-winning role in "The Queen", Helen Mirren is one of the world's most eminent actors today. This unofficial fansite provides you with all latest
news, photos and videos on her past and present projects. Enjoy your stay.
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Celebrating
10 years
on the web
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The Roaring Girl
January 13 - January, 28 1983
| The Royal Shakespeare Company
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The Dekker-Middleton canon was littleknown in the 1980s, least of all The “The Roaring Girl”, and theatre reviews were positive and sympathetic. Comparing the play’s attitude towards sex and wealth with that of the day, Don Chapman wrote in the Oxford Mail that Mirren’s Moll was “a feminist Robin Hood preaching equality of the sexes and an end topoverty and corruption”. She “vindicated women’s right to smoke and proves female superiority again and again”. Some critics were impressed by Kyle’s vision in staging this “marvellous pageant of colour and excitement” and the “smell and feel” of seventeenth-century London. Terry Grimley in the Birmingham Post applauded the production’s “care and lavishness”, with Kyle unearthing an unknown London – a “malodorous haunt of harlots, hoodlums, men-about-town, con men, downtrodden”. Although Michael Billington found the play “no masterpiece”, he wrote in the Guardian that the success of Kyle’s production lies partly in its centralcasting and partly in its ability to evoke the teeming variety of Jacobean London. And he concluded that this “enjoyable revival… vindicates Kyle’s one-man campaign toexplore the byways as well as the highwaysof English drama”.