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| Year | Theatre Company | Name of Play | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | Arts Theatre | Closer to Heaven | Billie Tricks |
| . | Bush Theatre | Turning Over | . |
| 1996 | Chichester Festival Theatre | Uncle Vanya | Sonya |
| 1995 | Donmar Warehouse | Insignificance | The Actress |
| 1981 | Glasgow Citizens Company | Desperado Corner (revival) | Val |
| 1981 | Glasgow Citizens Company | Madame Louise | Penny |
| . | Hampstead Theatre | Imagine Drowning | . |
| . | Hull Truck | Ooh La La | . |
| . | I. C. A. | The Treat | . |
| . | Leicester Haymarket | Summer and Smoke | . |
| . | Oxford Playhouse | Turning Over | . |
| . | Palace Theatre, Watford | Over a Barrell | . |
| . | Renaissance Company | Twelfth Night | Viola |
| . | Royal Court Theatre | My Heart's a Suitcase | . |
| . | Royal Exchange, Manchester | Macbeth | Lady Macbeth |
| 1998 | Royal National Theatre | Closer | Anna |
| 1992 | Royal National Theatre | Night of the Iguana | Maxine Faulk |
| 1992 | Royal National Theatre | Pygmalian | Eliza Doolittle |
| 1984 | Royal ShakespeareCompany | Camille | Marguerite |
| 1987 | Royal ShakespeareCompany | The Dead Monkey | Dolores |
| 1984 | Royal ShakespeareCompany | Hamlet | Ophelia |
| 1984 | Royal ShakespeareCompany | Love's Labour's Lost | Jacquetta |
| . | Soho Poly | The Mission | . |
| . | Theatre Royal, Stratford East | Riff Raff Rules | . |
| . | Tricycle Theatre | Space Ache | . |
RADIO/AUDIO TAPES| Year | Production | Description | Cast |
|---|---|---|---|
1998 | TAMING OF THE SHREW | Shakespeare's play. Complete text, directed by Clive Brill |
Frances Barber (Kate), Roger Allam (Petruchio) |
". . .. I entered those initial days of rehearsal with the notion that the play we were embarking upon was really called 'Ophelia and her Downfall' . . ."
Boy George, SUNDAY EXPRESS, 3 June 2001
. . . Frances Barber, who is loveably tragic and self-aware . . . almost steals the show . . .
Michael Billington, GUARDIAN, 10 July 1996
. . . Frances Barber's Sonya yearns for the possibility of a life with Astrov: there is something wonderfully unguarded about the way she licks her hand after he has kissed it and when, at the end, she knows he has finally departed, her attempt to preserve a mask of serenity is belied by her sobs and heaving shoulders. . .
Robert Butler, INDEPENDENT on SUNDAY, 14 July 1996
. . . Frances Barber creates real depths as the plain, practical Sonya, finally breaking down as she returns to the humdrum world of the estate accounts.. . .
Alastair Macaulay, FINANCIAL TIMES, 12 July 1996
. . . And Barber - though some of her performance is unsuccessful - seems to be the only actor in the cast interested in reconceiving the character she plays. . .
Robert Hewison, SUNDAY TIMES, 14 July 1996
. . . but the honours go to Eve's Dr. Astrov and Barber's desperate Sonya. Astrov's alcoholism dominates the early part of the play, as Sonya's feelings for him hesitatingly emerge only to be crushed by Astrov's sudden passion for Yelena . . .
Nick Curtis, EVENING STANDARD, 20 September 1996
. . . Apart from Trevor Eve, and Frances Barber as a touching Sonya, none of the cast get under the skin of the characters. . .
Lyn Gardner, GUARDIAN, 20 September 1996
. . . Only Frances Barber's Sonya has neither the guile nor sense of self-preservation to hide her true feelings. "He didn't understand," she convinces herself, in a whirl of self-deceiving happiness after signalling her feelings for Trevor Eve's complex, seethingly bitter, drunken Astrov. He understands very well indeed . . .
Kate Stratton, TIME OUT, 25 September 1996
. . . It's when the production's expertise triumphs over reverence - when Frances Barber as the emotionally disappointed Sonya throws a tray of medicine at her tetchy father - that it finds its best form. Barber, with scrubbed face and scraped-back hair, exudes a dug-in integrity fed on scraps of emotional comfort. . . .
The germ of the play came to Johnson when he read that Marilyn Monroe had once included Einstein on a list of men she'd most like to sleep with. Bringing them together onstage was an inspiration, but like Stoppard, Johnson is unusually generous with both the ideas and the jokes. So as well as the great brain and the great beauty, the playwright also wheels on Senator Joe McCarthy (a splendidly malign Ian Hogg), blackmailing Einstein to stand up for Uncle Sam, and Joe DiMaggio (Jack Klaff), the hilariously dumb, gumchewing all-American baseball star who was married to Monroe.
Much of the sheer fun of the play, set in 1953, comes from seeing these characters so superbly impersonated. In Terry Johnson's sharp, witty production, Frances Barber doesn't just look like Marilyn Monroe, she also suggests the heart-stopping vulnerability that made - and still makes - strong men go weak at the knees.
. . .it is the emotion that lies beyond the ideas that makes Insignificance so moving. Both Barber and Klaff movingly capture a marriage that is a mixture of tenderness, irritation and baffled incomprehension. And Monroe's longing for a child, her physical frailty and gathering desperation cut at the heart like a knife. . .
The secret of the universe, as Einstein and Marilyn discover amid gales of delighted laughter, is not to waste your life looking for it. At moments like this, Johnson's remarkable play seems to be blessed with what I can only describe as grace.
John Peter, SUNDAY TIMES, 11 June 1995
. . . To know something, as Einstein explains to Monroe, is not the same as to understand it. This is why each of the four has something that to the others is insignificant, incomprehensible, or both. So what is real? Who is real? If you think that only you yourself are real, how do you explain the reality of things you imagine, such as a deadly weapon or a man you could really love? (Is a stage-play real?) And if it's not worth knowing things or people without understanding that, what is there to value? What is the value of values, and can you understand the difference? This marvellous play is tragical, comical, philosophical and fantastical all at once: both science and science fiction, a dance of ideas, a sonata of feelings. Alun Armstrong, Frances Barber, Jack Klaff and Ian Hogg play the four great tragic icons with a controlled passion and a technical expertise that can only come from actors who not only know but understand.
Jack Tinker, DAILY MAIL, 8 June 1995
. . . To witness Frances Barber's luminous Marilyn eagerly enacting the theory of relativity to Alun Armstrong's courtly Einstein is a conjuring trick to make anyone marvel. For both become equal before your eyes. . .
Bill Hagerty, SUNDAY TIMES, 8 June 1995
. . . Frances Barber in the pivotal Monroe role, does not attempt impersonation. No breathless, little girl voice. No pout.
Blonde-teased hair and white, haltered Seven Year Itch dress notwithstanding, she plays the character from inside out.
The silent moments when she realises she has miscarried her and DiMaggio's baby are as eloquent as any text. This is acting of the highest order. . .
Clive Hirschhorn, SUNDAY EXPRESS, 11 June 1995
. . . Monroe, having charmingly demonstrated to the old man his theory of relativity, offers to spend the night with him.
A mind-boggling prospect, to be sure, and kaiboshed by the sudden arrival of her husband, a gum-chewing Di Maggio.
The tortured relationship between the legendary baseball hero and a star who was given more than she dreamed of but nothing she wanted, is encapsulated in short scenes saying more about their failed marriage than a dozen biographies. . . .
Benedict Nightingale, DAILY MAIL, 9 June 1995
. . . The nature of reality is often raised, most entertainingly by Barber's Actress, who launches into an excited little lecture on relativity theory for the benefit of its discoverer. Fame, celebrity and the frustrations they bring are, however, more immediate and pressing concerns, for in Einstein, DiMaggio and Monroe we have the archetypes of, respectively, brain, brawn and beauty. . . .
Alastair Macaulay, FINANCIAL TIMES, 8 June 1995
. . . Given the impossible task of enacting Marilyn, Frances Barber succeeds not by letter-perfect impersonation - though there are angles by which her resemblance is remarkable - but by producing an utterly organic characterisation: bubbly, intelligent, vulnerable, poignant. . .
Michael Billington, GUARDIAN, 8 June 1995
. . . In the play's most famous, delicately witty scene - played with intellectual and sexual ecstasy by the stunning Frances Barber - she demonstrates to Einstein the theory of relativity with the aid of two toy trains, a flashlight and a trio of silver balloons. . . .Barber's Monroe, in the famous pleated Seven Year Itch dress, is memorably a woman who has both the orphaned solitude of stardom, and a desperate desire to know. . .
Christopher Edwards, SPECTATOR, 18 April 1992
. . . the piece de resistance is the encounter between a not-quite-completed Eliza and nice, drawing-room conversation. Frances Barber is brilliantly funny. Eliza has almost mastered the accent, but her grammar and her topics of conversation betray the flower girl. She comes across, hilariously, as an upwardly mobile android . . .
Sheridan Morley, HERALD TRIBUNE, 15April 1992
. . . Frances Barber's Eliza is just off the usual center, neither an emergent feminist nor the complacent bride of Frankenstein, but instead a porcelain doll given to uttering conversation-stoppers as if speaking a foreign language, which of course she is . . .
Tony Dunn, TRIBUNE, 24 April 1992
. . . Frances Barber's Eliza is a strong foil for Higgins and Pickering as another Holmes and Watson, the female from the lower depths who pollutes their rationality with her shrieks and her rags and her feelings. The sharp beauty of her cheekbones and her shoulders is gradually moulded to match the precision of her speech and the famous tale about the aunt "what got done in" is delivered head-on to the audience out of a perfect armour of white sheath-dress and sculpted, made-up face. but she revives her natural, easy movement for the last scene where she demands the right to be loved and offers a calm, snow-white throat as Higgins almost strangles his prodigy of speech in his exasperation. . . .
Charles Spencer, DAILY TELEGRAPH, 13 April 1992
. . . Frances Barber hilariously and touchingly charts Eliza's progress from squawking indignation to assured self-confidence. In the early scenes she sometimes seems less like a human than a terrified wild animal, and she is in extraordinary form in her first public appearance at Mrs. Higgins's tea party, moving with the stiffness of an automaton and speaking in a voice that sounds like a Martian after a course at the Berlitz. Her wonderful speech about the death of an aunt ("It's my belief they done the old woman in") is as blissfully funny as anything on the London stage. There is real passion and pain in her bruising confrontation with Higgins after the embassy ball . . .
Robert Butler, INDEPENDENT on SUNDAY, 12 April 1992
. . . Whether leaping across the stage in her kimono, cowering with fear at the prospect of a bath or stiffly describing the weather to her first tea-party, Barber has a defiant independence that Shaw would have relished. Each of the rapid changes in her situation, from her first appearance as a squat, bawling figure in a church portico to the genuine pain of her final scene with Higgins, is handled with endearing conviction.
Malcolm Rutherford, FINANCIAL TIMES, 11 April 1992
. . . That leaves Eliza. Curiously, it is rather a straight part. We know where she comes from and where she goes. All she has to do is deliver - but the play would fall if she put a foot wrong. Frances Barber never does. As the play closes, she radiates self-confidence - both as Eliza and Frances Barber.
David Nathan, JEWISH CHRONICLE, 17 April 1992
. . . Frances Barber's Eliza brilliantly draws on both moods as she battles for a suitable setting for her lively mind and quick ear. . .
Michael Coveney, OBSERVER, 12 April 1992
. . . In partnering him with Frances Barber as Eliza, director Howard Davies has struck gold. Their last long scene, played in a twisting skein of self-deception, emotional confusion and bitter acceptance, rounds off a notable duet, whose sonic features are his casual, flickering airiness and her squall of catty squeals
Howard, abetted by Robin Bailey's ruby-rich vowelled Pickering, withstands Barber's assaults with the melifluous springiness of a fine old concertina. And Barber stiffens to a very funny, perfectly timed moving statue at the trial tea party before embarking on her elegant physical and spiritual transformation. The range of her performance, vocally and intellectually, marks the highest achievement of her career since the RSC Camille
Michael Billington, GUARDIAN, 11 April 1992
. . . It is sad to see Shaw's ironic wit and verbal music being butchered to make a designer's holiday. But two performances manage to survive intact, one of which, fortunately, is Frances Barber's Eliza. She doesn't just capture the character's transformation from caterwauling flowerseller into independent woman: she also has the gift of humour and pathos. She is extremely funny in the famous tea-party scene, turning Eliza into a rigid Bergsonian automaton and, in the final, crucial encounter with Higgins, she implies that underneath the Ibsenite facade of the new woman lurks a wealth of tenderness for her teacher. . . .
Kenneth Hurren, MAIL on SUNDAY, 12 April 1992
. . . But the evening belongs gloriously to its Eliza.
Frances Barber unwraps this gift of a part hilariously and touchingly, turning the raucous street kid into an elegant lady while suggesting that there's a bit of incorruptible vulgarity still smouldering in there somewhere. She's an unalloyed delight.
Clive Hirschhorn, SUNDAY EXPRESS, 12 April 1992
. . . an Eliza Doolittle in Frances Barber who manages to tickle your funny-bone and break your heart at the same time. . .
Graham Hassell, WHAT'S ON, 15 April 1992
. . . It's this realism which largely helps to thwart the love interest. Eliza is very much a specimen for scientific interest. At one stage there are clear parallels with The Madness of George III which plays here in rep, with Eliza held in a restraining chair and having her old Lisson Grove vowels extracted by the slightly cranky, white-coated and instrument weilding professor. Neither is this approach at odds with the natural comedy of the piece. Prudery goes out the window with a glimpse of a naked Eliza being cajoled into the first hot bath of her life, but the scene is made funny by the sight of Alison Fiske's housekeeper standing over her wearing thick gloves and a long handled scrubbing brush.
There's also the consideration of this Eliza's transformation into a lady being decidedly realistic, a real feather in Miss Barber's bonnet considering neither cockney nor pukka English, but Wolverhampton, is her natural dialect. Neither does her metamorphosis leave her a breathtaking beauty but merely an attractive young woman both to look at and listen to. . .
Steve Grant, TIME OUT, 15 April 1992
. . . Barber's glowing, funny, touching transformation as Eliza. . .
Maureen Paton, SUNDAY EXPRESS, 10 April 1992
This is Eliza Doolittle as never seen before. For this is a nude Eliza in all her full frontal glory, squawking with indignation as she is heaved into a new-fangled bath for the first time in her life.
Although voluptuous actress Frances Barber is famously comely, the effect is poignantly comical rather than even remotely slacious.
"I've never took off all me clothes in me life before," screeches the Covent Garden flower girl. But after starring in such paeans to sexual freedom as Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Mis Barber anticipated an unscheduled laugh from the audience at that point.
She is the sexiest serious actress since Helen Mirren - and the earthiest and most endearing Eliza to take the stage. . .
Paul Taylor, INDEPENDENT, 11 April 1992
. . . A grimy, boyish urchin in her cockney incarnation, Frances Barber's delectable Eliza is quite hysterically comic at the nerve-racking halfway stage when her character has acquired an effortful upper-class accent, while retaining a decidedly lower-class sense of grammar and conversational range.
At the famous tea party, she holds herself with the gingerly stiffness of someone wearing a neck brace, and heaps pedantic (if not always accurate) pronunciational care on the lowlife saga of her aunt's death. "Them she lived with would have killed her for a hat-pin, let alone a hat" she says, with lavish aspirates and sounding marginally less natural than many a speak-your-weight machine. Her timing in this scene is brilliant: you keep thinking she's finished and that you can stop sweating for her; then she plunges on.
Barber is just as impressive in the later stages of Eliza's development, letting you see all her pain and disorientation and conveying, with touching dignity, the new astuteness and maturity that enable her to perceive that the real difference between a lady and a flower-girl "is not how she behaves, but how she is treated." . . .
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