Reviews of performance in ONCE IN A LIFETIME at Olivier (National Theatre).

VICTORIA HAMILTON

DOB, PLACE: 5 April 1971 in Wimbledon, south London TRAINED: LAMDA IN HER OWN WORDS

Performance History AWARDS: Nominated for 2004 Best Actress OLIVIER AWARD for Suddenly Last Summer 2004 Evening Standard Best Actress Award for Suddenly Last Summer Nominated for 2003 Best Leading Actress TONY AWARD as Sheila in Broadway transfer of JOE EGG 2001 WHAT's ON STAGE Award for Best Actress for Sheila in JOE EGG 2000 Barclays Theatre Award and Critics' Circle Award for Best Actress: for As You Like It at the Sheffield Crucible and Lyric Hammersmith. 1996 Critics Circle Award for Best Newcomer 1995 Nomination for Ian Charleson Award (Best classical actor under 30) for Peter Hall Company's MASTER BUILDER CRITICAL QUOTABLES FILM and TELEVISION see Internet Movie Database RADIO/AUDIO TAPES

THEATRE

IN HER OWN WORDS

". . .When I left drama school, I looked around at the actresses I most admired, people like Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, and I noticed that they'd all started in classical theatre. So I decided to do nothing but that for five years. I really believe it's the best grounding you can get and I've learned so much. Now I feel ready to take on other things as well."
". . .Television and film has only really started to happen for me over the past couple of years. I've been lucky as most of what I've done have been genuinely good scripts with good directors so it's been a nice springboard. The fact is, as an actor, you need to do telly to live."

Why acting? Some actors from the National Theatre came to my school to do a workshop and I suddenly felt I could express myself. How did you get the part of Hilde? The casting director Gillian Diamond came to see me in 'Retreat' at the Orange Tree, and dragged Peter Hall and Alan Bates to see it as well. I went for a meeting with Peter and Alan, but I wasn't for a moment frightened because I never believed it would happen. How did you cope with the West End? I can remember thinking on the first day of rehearsals: I can either be intimidated by this and do a lousy job, or get in there and be as relaxed as I can. Peter never treated me as the new girl. Everyone treated everyone else as equals. And the reviews? I was delighted it was so well received, but I made a point of not reading the reviews until we had actually finished the run. Tim Pigott-Smith taught me how to walk past the notice-board at the Orange Tree without reading them. But it was hard. I had my mum on the phone going: 'Oh my God, listen to this.' It was difficult to say: 'Hang on a minute, I think it's better if I concentrate on the play.' Have you ever had a real stinker? Not that I've read. When we were doing the tour of 'The Master Builder', one line of a regional review put up on the board caught my eye saying they thought my Hilde was too modern. I sat around for hours wondering what it meant.

CRITICAL QUOTABLES

. . . The plot involves a trio of second-raters from vaudeville - Lloyd Hutchinson's cheery Jerry, Adrian Scarborough's phlegmatic George, Victoria Hamilton's savvy May - who join what they see as a new gold rush. They'll set up a voice school for performers who, like the squawking screen goddess in Singin' in the Rain, can't cope with talkies. A lucky introduction to David Suchet's Glogauer, a Mr Big with a taste for zebra suits, gets them hired, then inexplicably fired, then fancifully rehired, thanks to the inadvertently happy blunders of Scarborough's Candide-like George.

. . . For while there is much to enjoy in this production - the direction is snappy, the set hugely impressive and the cast well-drilled and finely led by Adrian Scarborough, Victoria Hamilton and David Suchet - it represents very little more than a 'swell' evening.

Unfortunately, for something that really has so little below the surface, one is tempted to feel that it's not quite as fun as it should be. That said, with the story rattling along and Hamilton turning in a marvellous performance as the only character who can see right through all of Tinseltown's glitz and glam, it is hard not to enjoy oneself.

. . . Victoria Hamilton is superb, too, as May, using a defensive brittleness to disguise her aching heart as her Tiggerish boyfriend (Lloyd Hutchinson) becomes so obsessed with fame and fortune in Hollywood that he forgets all about their fine romance.

As so often, Hamilton discovers an emotion that goes much deeper than the script would seem to suggest, adding heart and substance to a show that might otherwise seem like little more than froth.

. . . In the wise-cracking, heartsore Eve Arden-style role of May, Victoria Hamilton looks as though she'd be happier if the part had a third dimension.

. . . But good actors, such as Victoria Hamilton and Lloyd Hutchinson as George's fellow-travellers, are left vainly searching for a character instead of opting for cartoon energy.

. . . But Victoria Hamilton's charm is wasted, and despite squeals and shimmying and singing waiters, Edward Hall's production moves slowly. Once in a lifetime? Once is enough.

. . . . . . Having set the pace beautifully, Rigg hands over the baton of centrality to Victoria Hamilton who brings her extraordinary talent for emotional truth and transparency to the tricky role of Catharine. She communicates piercingly the baffled free spirit in her character. Jittery, vulnerable, yet capable of flicks of humour that demonstrate how, even in her custodial plight, she has more flexibility of soul than her "normal" family and she ends up relaying the story of Sebastian's end with the thrilling, haunted momentum of someone who feels nightmarishly pursued by the memory of it.

. . . No praise is too high for Victoria Hamilton either, who, as Mrs Venable's niece, spills the beans about the martyred Sebastian. Hamilton suggests a woman possessed by memories that can only be exorcised by revelation; and, as she describes her experience of sexual cruising with Sebastian, culminating in his cannibalised death, she relives it with burning intensity. Gielgud once jokingly dismissed the play as Please Don't Eat the Pansies. In Grandage's production what might seem a grotesque fable achieves tragic status

. . . Victoria Hamilton gives a powerful performance as Catherine. Her excitable manner, fixed glare and taut posture suggest a woman haunted by terrible memories. When she grasps Dr Cukrowicz (Mark Bazeley) to seek comfort and affection one can feel the terrible loneliness that is devouring her. . .

. . . This has been an excellent week for actresses and it would be no great surprise if, come the end of the year, several of this crop win award nominations.

. . . However, unless something really special happens in the second half of the year, they will all have to stand aside on the big night. Victoria Hamilton's incredibly moving portrayal of the ill-used Catharine in Suddenly Last Summer is really special and will wring tears from even hardened cynics. In particular, she gives two speeches that grip the audience to such an extent that it feels as if collective breath is being held

. . . Victoria Hamilton is even more startling as Catherine. With her dark, deep-set eyes and initially rigid posture, she suggests a woman haunted by memory. The way she mauls Mark Bazeley's sympathetic doctor suggests she is a victim of the solitude that afflicts all Williams's characters. Such is the production's transfixing power that when the doors of Oram's set finally close you feel you have witnessed a poetic evocation of human loneliness.

Throughout the Sweet Panic, there runs a whole host of themes that have marked the work of its dramatist, Stephen Poliakoff. The unhappy inner child in each of us, the aggrieved inner adult obsessive, the personal histories we carry and that can be revisited, the larger history around us that's part of our daily lives, the fraught ethics of where private lives and public work intersect, and London, the infinitely layered city that carries all this and more in its mighty flow.

. . . In truth, Sweet Panic's plot feels contrived, but it's a contrivance we want to believe in. This is, above all, a charmingly "textured" play, laden with Poliakoff's and his characters' fascination with the changing detail of London life. Even as the final scene is heading for its climax, Clare and Mrs Trevel need to spend time on the photo-booths of the 1960s, and such detail always enriches the play.

Poliakoff himself directs. Victoria Hamilton's Clare and Jane Horrocks's Mrs Trevel fence finely with each other, now polar opposites (they end act one in contrasting black and white), now sisters under the skin. . .

Victoria Hamilton is excellent as Clare: what she presents is a woman of cool assurance gradually disintegrating under external pressure.

Victoria Hamilton plays a child psychiatrist, Clare. She's sympathetic, sharp and evidently good at her job, with an amiable academic boyfriend, who bores for England on the subject of London buses.

But when one of the children she is treating goes missing over a couple of days, and the boy's mother (Horrocks) finds herself unable to contact Clare, the shrink's ordered life spins into chaos.

Mrs Trevel, the self-proclaimed "mother from hell", goes on the rampage, turning into a stalker madly intent on finishing Clare's career and reducing her to nothing. Gripping stuff. Unfortunately, Poliakoff seems to want to make his drama a Bumper Compendium of Almost Everything.

There are embarrassing passages when Hamilton is required to impersonate the children she is treating to give a confused kid's-eye view of the world. There is much debate over whether the world is safer now - or more dangerous - than it was 30 years ago. There are riffs on our growing culture of blame and litigation. And there is some pretty limp comedy involving the boyfriend's book on the Metrobus.

. . . And though I don't want to give too much away, the ending is frankly risible. I mean, would you voluntarily go down, alone, into an underground car park with a woman who has threatened to destroy you? No, of course you wouldn't. Victoria Hamilton does, though. Worse still, Poliakoff's conclusion - that panic is good, and that parents ought to admit to their children that they haven't the faintest clue about what is going to become of them - strikes me as being downright bonkers.

. . . Hamilton is impressive, too, in her account of a competent woman whose life - and belief system - collapse nightmarishly around her, though her raw emotional anguish can't conceal the implausibility of the play's climax . . .

Victoria Hamilton turns in a beautiful performance, exuding a warmth, honesty and sensitivity that are tried to breaking point. This character switches into monologues where she impersonates her young patients and gives us access to their inner lives. But though Hamilton delivers these solos with empathy, the convention is gratingly theatrical. Why is Clare sometimes aware that there is an audience? And why is she prepared to infringe the code of professional confidentiality?

. . .As the stalkee, Victoria Hamilton crumples into layers of intelligence and sympathy. But both have pretty thankless things to do.

. . .Hamilton has to imitate her child-subjects: she puts on funny voices and waggles her legs in the air, so that she ends up looking as if she's eaten the mites. . .

. . . At the centre of this sits Victoria Hamilton, who plays her namesake with a zaniness untapped in her previous, award-winning, dramatic performances. "There are only two qualities that I flatter myself on: I'm not vain and I'm not selfish," pronounces her lady of the house, before proceeding to prove otherwise. With heaving chest, quivering lip, tossing mane, and all manner of mincing and posturing, Hamilton is a bundle of unstoppable comic energy. This is without question the Victoria Hamilton show and she is sensational . . .

Christopher Luscombe's high-spirited, enjoyably over-the-top revival stars Victoria Hamilton, a first-rate actress who here delivers a bravura caricature of pampered egotism and egregious self-deception.

. . . what lingers in the memory is the spectacle of that gifted young actor Victoria Hamilton using the central role as a vehicle for all her most besettingly artificial and bad-actorly tricks. Hamilton has been before the public for some eight years, and she can be heart-catching. From the start of her career, Hamilton has had the ability to catch the sympathies of her audience in the fine net of her own nervous system.Paradoxically, she has never been able to resist fending the same audience off, and this she has achieved by two methods: one, by juggling around with her vocal registers and resonances (the Kenneth Williams method); and two, by being physically "theatrical", with an energetic supply of gestures (acting from the armpits out). In Home and Beauty, she indulges these two forms to their utmost. Everything about her performance says: "Don't believe this silly trash! Just enjoy my silly insincerities and applaud my hamminess! Nobody could believe this twaddle, so applaud me." Not since Geraldine McEwan have we see a major acting talent so horridly stay on the outside of a role. . .

. . . The effervescent Victoria Hamilton, an actress who can burn with passionate sincerity, is here reduced to cartoon capering. She’s all love-me eyes and drama-queen poses more appropriate to silent-movie melodrama. . .

You shouldn't always believe the author. Although Somerset Maugham dubbed his 1919 play "a farce" it is actually a misogynist comedy dipped in vitriol. But, taking Maugham all too literally, Christopher Luscombe has given it a frantic, eye-popping production that boasts more mugging than you'll find on a Saturday night in Leicester Square. The chief victim of Luscombe's overheated approach is Victoria Hamilton, before whom I normally bow down in adoration. . . . the play suggests that women are scheming, manipulative creatures. But that doesn't justify Hamilton's increasingly bizarre performance. Fending off unwanted attention, she deploys the kind of extravagant hand gestures that went out with Mrs Siddons. At one point, she throws herself at the scenery as if about to eat it. And she brandishes a teddy bear, with a cry of "Mad, mad, mad" in a way that suggests she might easily dash its brains out. Instead of playing the character from her own point of view, she presents us with a tragedy queen who goes over the top more often than her war-hero husbands. The director is clearly to blame; but the result is actually to heighten Maugham's sexual chauvinism by making the heroine so impossible that you wonder why her first husband bothered to return. Luscombe's farcical approach also ignores the fact that, after the first act, the play becomes a social comedy.

. . . That most cherishable of actresses, Victoria Hamilton, who brought such warmth and emotional depth to her great recent performances as Rosalind and the wife in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, here proves that she is equally capable of playing a hilarious, thorough-going bitch.

Her wife is a comic monster of self-serving affectation, her voice quavering with passion, and her arms forming themselves into absurdly melodramatic positions as she plumbs the depths of entirely bogus emotion. She is as pretty as a picture and absolute poison.

A DAY IN THE DEATH OF JOE EGG London 2001; New York 2003

. . . for rarer-than-rare perfection, there is Victoria Hamilton, whose Sheila warms the spirit even as it breaks the heart. Not far behind is Eddie Izzard, better known as a stand-up comic, with an intricately devised Bri. Miss Joe Egg at your own peril.

. . . However, it is Victoria Hamilton who stands out. Her undying love for her daughter is touching and utterly convincing. You certainly feel her pain, desperation and love for her mentally handicapped child. It is a heartbreaking performance, but also an uplifting one. She alone keeps faith in Joe even when all the evidence is that she will always remain unresponsive . . .

. . . Whatever the other actors' contribution, the main reason Laurence Boswell's production works so well is because Victoria Hamilton sustains its emotional pulse. Not only does she create the space for Izzard and others to ham things up, she also bears the the play's sentimental moral alone.

. . .But, on a second viewing, it is clear that Victoria Hamilton's Sheila is the rock on which Laurence Boswell's production is built. She not only has Sheila's sexiness, optimism and blind faith in remedial possibilities: she also plays off Izzard's Bri perfectly so that their games become like practised marital rituals which erupt into a wild giggling spontaneity. It is through Hamilton that we realise that the play is, among many other things, a study in female resilience and the power of the life force, which is what makes it one of the classic postwar comedies.

There are more flawless actresses than Victoria Hamilton, who chops the air with her arms like a little tin soldier - sometimes so vigorously that her phrasing marches in tandem. But there is no one who can go so straight to the heart, and so immediately change the emotional climate, of a scene. She makes the expression 'welling up' seem not a cliché but the simple truth.

.But Izzard's smashing performance never hijacks Laurence Boswell's production and turns it into a one man show. Victoria Hamilton's lovely performance as the fiercely loving Sheila, one of the most generous and heartfelt tributes a dramatist can ever have paid to his wife, is the most moving I have seen on stage all year. She is constantly caught between laughter and tears and her persistence in hope, and the unconditional love she shows for her totally unresponsive child, cut at the heart like a knife. . . . This is a terrific production of an unmistakably great play.

More remarkable still is Victoria Hamilton as his wife. She is sexy, and often funny, but there is an emotional vulnerability in this performance that is at times almost too painful to watch. Her aching, unconditional love for her unresponsive child, the way she just about holds back the tears as she attempts to keep things going, and above all the sheer, uncloying goodness she suggests, are all beautifully achieved. It is a performance that confirms Hamilton as perhaps the finest, and most touching, actress of her generation.

. . .Sheila (a wonderfully open and moving Victoria Hamilton) seem to catch one another off-guard by some new spontaneous variation, and for a split second, as they nearly corpse, you witness the deep intimacy of their shared plight. But when Hamilton has the audience to herself and confides a determined faith in Joe Egg's capacity for improvement, you sense the loneliness and aching need for adult contact of a woman who has to cope with two overgrown babies, one of them Bri.

Peter Nichols's play about a young couple with an incurably handicapped child is a soul- wrenching comedy of harrowing humanity. Irving Wardle wrote in 1967 that it made the earth move under your feet. It still does. Its construction is masterly. The couple's compulsive play-acting tells you about the past, and it helps them make life endurable. It lets them tell each other, and the audience, unbearable things, and it stretches the relationship to breaking point as Sheila senses that Brian's stamina is giving out. There is no love so helpless and hopeless as loving somebody who is helpless and hopeless. Victoria Hamilton and Clive Owen give performances that rank among the finest in the West End for years. Such anguish, so much hope - and such fearless precision and emotional strength in portraying them. John Warnaby and Robin Weaver are spot-on as the appallingly normal couple, and Prunella Scales turns in a virtuoso performance as the mother-in-law from hell. One of the greatest modern English plays, and Laurence Boswell's production does it proud.

Victoria Hamilton is unstoppably hilarious as a mummerset-accented Margery Pinchwife, whose progression from child of nature to first-time coquette is measured with the ungainly steps of a halfwit. The sight of her caught in a tug-of-war between husband (a superbly twitchy turn from David Ross) and Horner is worth the price of admission alone.

. . . last year, Hamilton shone as a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl in As You Like It. In William Wycherley's 1675 play The Country Wife she puts on trousers again - this time at the behest of her jealous husband, anxious to conceal her beguiling features. The subterfuge proves inflammatory: pert in pantaloons, she is enthusiastically snogged by a passing wit. . . .

Kate Bassett, INDEPENDENT on SUNDAY, 1 October 2000 . . . the diminutive Hamilton - the Judi Dench of her generation - is an absolute joy. Hyperactively galumphing around her chambers on a hobby horse- one minute giggling breathlessly and the next stroppily huffing and puffing when denied new-found pleasures - her Margery is both a hilarious bumpkin and an adorable passionate innocent. Priceless. John Peter, THE SUNDAY TIMES, 8 October 2000 Mrs Pinchwife (Victoria Hamilton) gives a hyperactive performance, busy and bouncy, like a pretty, boisterous, slightly retarded urchin

Victoria Hamilton is exhilaratingly good as the heroine who dresses down as a very pretty boy when she's banished from court to the Forest of Arden, a place where people pause and find their true selves.

Here's an actress in the mould of Judi Dench. Instinctive, engaging, spirited, with terrific comic timing and an emotional openness which holds and rewards attention. She really does look as if she has, as she says, fallen fathoms-deep in love at first sight of Orlando.

He kises her hand, and when she retrieves it she holds it as if it is something sacred she'll never wash again. Her performance thrillingly captures all the breathless impatience and impulsiveness of young love, its pain as well as its pleasure.

Victoria Hamilton's Rosalind, a performance of truly wonderful vivacity, charm and honesty. "When I think, I must speak," she says and the truth of this is demonstrated in the character's frankness. But what Hamilton shows us is the instant of thinking. Her darting voice; gestures seemingly unconstrained yet never ugly; quick, almost jerky movements; all this works towards creating our sense that her words come newly minted from the brain, and are one with feelings bursting from her heart.

Victoria Hamilton is a sexy Rosalind, playful but never twee or arch, who likes being a man because it is dangerous and an unexpected turn-on. She speaks Rosalind's wittiest lines as if they had just occurred to her (not many actresses can), and her epilogue has a sweetness that brings a lump to your throat.

Victoria Hamilton has a lovely freshness and spontaneity as Rosalind. In the early scenes, in the usurping Duke's court, you sense the nervy suffering of a young woman in a hostile environment. The coup de foudre when she falls for Orlando is superbly caught, and so too is the ardour of her wooing when, breasts bound, she is disguised as a feral, almost Peter Pan-like boy.

I have never seen a Rosalind who so movingly captures the hurt as well as the pleasure of love. In the role-playing scenes, her love for Orlando almost physically overwhelms her, but she cannot be sure it is fully reciprocated, since he thinks he's merely playing games with a boy.

There is a tremendous feeling here of the great ache of passion, which makes the final scenes of recognition and marriage especially moving. Hamilton brilliantly shows how an unhappy girl is transformed into a glowingly confident woman.

. . . the diminutive but prodigiously talented Victoria Hamilton annexes the role of Rosalind for the smaller actress.

. . . gratitude is in order. First to Victoria Hamilton for her Rosalind, a dazed and dazzling creature of fragile intensity who breathes every word as if it had just fluttered into her mind, yet keeps scansion and timing with the precision of a drill sergeant..

. . . At its centre is one of the most lovable, huggable Rosalinds I have ever seen. Victoria Hamilton is a vulnerable figure, not much taller than Samantha Spiro's wickedly funny Celia with whom she is first seen wittily bantering in their determinedly uper-crust accents. She's vulnerable throughout: at the beginning, living under the rule of the man who banished her father; and deliciously o in Arden, completely overwhelmed by love. Spinning in the forest in her male dress, she cries 'woo me', completely confusing Ben Daniels' delightfully gawkish Orlando who snaps her braces in an effort to loser the temperature and bring both himself and his strange, erotic teacher back to earth. Precisely because she is so open, she's also very funny, and touching too when she takes off her shirt to reveal a slight figure bandaged around the bust. . .

. . . Even with the works of William Shakespeare, every now and again comes along a performance that makes a play as fresh as the morning milk.

Such is Victoria Hamilton's funny, fizzy Rosalind in Michael Grandage's superb production of As You Like It, which started out in Sheffield and is now at the Lyric, in Hammersmith, west London, for a short season.

To breathe new life into a much-performed 1599 romantic comedy takes rare talent and Ms Hamilton has it by the bucketful.

. . . in the second half, it's Hamilton's play. With a face that's part china doll, part pixie, and a frame that's anything but "more than common tall", her disguise as Ganymede makes her look like an androgynous Dickensian urdhin, and Grandage makes the most of her ridiculous counterfeiting. WWhen Rosalind and Orlando like opposite each other, chins on hands, his face dwarfs hers; when he slaps her on the back, she's propelled into the air; and when he snaps her braces, she recoils in eye-stinging pain. (By the sound, so did many women in the audience.)

But sex-change antics apart, Hamilton effortlessly reveals rather than disguises Rosalind's sensibility. Freed from social constraints, she speaks her own mind while testing Orlando's.

Such is the transfixing power of Hamilton's magical performance - and indeed that of Daniels as a likeable, sloppy-jumpered Orlando - that Shakespeare's impossibly happy ending is even (somewhat impossibly) happier. . .

. . . Victoria Hamilton's Rosalind - a landmark performance in its impulsive passion and seemingly spur-of-the-moment wit - is complemented, to perfection, by the more contained fiery spirit of Samantha Spiro's pint-sized Celia.

. . . At the centre is Victoria Hamilton's radiant Rosalind. When she first appeared on the stage in 1995, at the tiny Orange Tree Theatre, Hamilton was riveting. Now her reputation will soar, along with Grandage's.

She fizzes when she's ferocious; when she weeps, her face looks like a flower opening up to the rain. She speaks each line as if she's discovering it. And she receives the words of others like body-blows; her extraordinary habit of attention is a leson to audiences, and to human beings.

. . . Everything in the play depends, in the first instance, on Rosalind, and with Rosalind everything depends, in the first instance, on charm. Victoria Hamilton has that quality in abundance, but she is also witty, energetic, intelligent and seeming-spontaneous. In fact she is as good a Rosalind as any of us are likely to see.

. . . What is there to say about Hamilton's Rosalind except that she is mercurial, full of heart and so touchingly confused when smitten by love that it is almost as if all the skin has been stripped away from her and she is a walking wound. She makes love seem hilarious, excruciatingly painful and so absolutely necessary for both the individual and society.

Michael Billington, GUARDIAN, September 26, 1997 . . . Victoria Hamilton's Cordelia beautifully mixes compassion and strength. Sheridan Morley, SPECTATOR, October 4, 1997 . . . perhaps above all, Victoria Hamilton's infinitely touching, St Joan-like Cordelia are all performances to treasure and there are still more where these came from.

. . . the broken simplicity of his reconciliation with Cordelia (a performance of glowing gentleness from Victoria Hamilton) reduced me to tears.

. . . Victoria Hamilton as Cordelia trembles like a page boy, unable to heave her heart into her mouth. Cutting her off, even as it happens, strikes everyone as a terrible aberration..

Victoria Hamilton's troubled Cordelia sends mute signals of appeal around the court and to the audience itself, knowing she is doomed the moment she hears her father ask who loves him the most.

Victoria Hamilton wrenches the heart as Nina, her gauche, touching naivety in the early scenes giving way to a terrifying brittleness and dry, choking sobs in the great last act. I have rarely seen an actress more movingly convey the ravages of time and experience.

Every single performance here . . . is the best in its role I think I have ever seen, but finally it is the young Victoria Hamilton, a discovery of Hall's and of Sam Walters out at the Orange Tree, whose Nina marks her out for intense future stage or screen stardom.

The performance of the night is Victoria Hamilton's as Nina, the symbolic heart of the play and the actress whose career, quite palpably on this occasion, will effortlessly eclipse Arkadina's. Miss Hamilton sustains an extraordinary level of nervous activity until we see her edging tragically towards the spotlight with a new baggage of bitter experience.

The most impressive features of the evening are Tom Stoppard's new version of the script and Victoria Hamilton's vivid, deeply felt Nina. . . .

In the first three acts, Ms hamilton's Nina is positively aglow with the ardour of youthful ineperience and keyed up to orchestra pitch (her guilelessly eager performance of Konstantin's eperimental play is a hilarious expose of its pretentiousness). In the last, veering between near-delirious tears and a desolately shrugging matter-of-factness, she's become a battered realist who, here, trudges prosaically, instead of poetically flying, out ot the play..

Victoria Hamilton's Nina has a naturalness that can only be the result of hard work. She is a bright, naive hysteric at first. By the end, she has quite changed. There is a terrible calm in her voice - the numb composure of despair.

Michael Billington, GUARDIAN, 14 May 1997 Victoria Hamilton's Nina also has exactly the right fame-hungry self-centredness. Initially comic, it becomes tragic in her final reduction to a life of touring mediocrity. Simon Reade, TIME OUT, 14 May 1997 Nina (gorgeously impetuous Victoria Hamilton) naively notes: "There's not much action in your play. It's all, you know, lines."

The best performance comes from Victoria Hamilton as the flighty, impulsive Nina, who collapses on the ground with relief moments after her first entrance. She has a lovely directness, not least when Dominic West, the intense young writer Konstantin, hands her a dead seagull: "Now what's that supposed to mean?" she asks. This is a very enjoyable Seagull, which answers many of those questions.

. . . Stoppard's text has witty moments - "having no backbone he could bend both ways" neatly mocks Trigorin's propensity for sexual sharing - but it rejects cleverness for clarity, momentum and subtlety of thought and feeling. This gives Hall's cast the chance to bring texture to their roles: a challenge they accept, starting with Dominic West's Kostia, fumbling writer and lover, and Victoria Hamilton's Nina, a parallel failure in the emotional and artistic stakes.

West is a big, gangling figure whose wounded-dog looks hide blundering rage, confused ambition and an intense sickness of heart. At first he contrasts strongly with Hamilton's Nina, who hurls herself into the role of the artless fame-freak, falling on her back in excitement at the prospect of meeting the novelist Trigorin. But shallowness vanishes when she reappears in the fourth-act rain. You don't doubt that her blenched, exhausted Nina, with her mewing, seagull-like sobs and blank, past-caring shrugs, has traversed the emotional chasms.

Victoria Hamilton's Cressida, in particular, is a remarkable creation. At first, she is all pert sweetness and giddy sexual expectation.

But, in the course of her night with Troilus, she grows into womanly maturity which is shattered when she is cruelly traded for a Greek. The great scene when she is ardently beseiged by Diomedes is played on a note of tremulous uncertainty which climaxes in a heart rending cry of "Troilus", followed by a swift and abrupt "farewell".

John Gross, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, 28 July 1996 Victoria Hamilton does a great deal better as Cressida: she even manages to make the swift transition from ingenue to wanton seem plausible. Bill Hagerty, NEWS OF THE WORLD, 28 July 1996 . . . it is the continuation of the march towards major stardom by Joseph Fiennes and Victoria Hamilton, in the title roles, for which Ian Judge's production will be best remembered. . . . David Hughes, MAIL on SUNDAY, 4 August 1996 Victoria Hamilton's enchanting tart of a Cressida is what lifts the show out of the classical into the classic. .

There can be no doubt that Joseph Fiennes and Victoria Hamilton are two of the most exciting, charismatic and sensual young actors of their generation . . . few can match Hamilton's delicate ardour and bubbling sense of mischief sacrificed in the cause of war.

The love affair of Troilus and Cressida, which becomes a fatal casualty of war, is Victoria Hamilton's triumph. Her girlish Cressida is not the usual, inconstant flirt with both eyes on the main chance, but a serious, self-possessed girl, delighted by first love. When involved in the Trojan exchange of prisoners with the Greeks and handed over as a prize for Richard Dillane's surly beach-boy hunk, Miss Hamilton yields in sheer, pressured desperation, not as the new lay of her land.

. . . Victoria Hamilton is exceptionally moving and persuasive in the difficult role of Cressida. You feel that it is her precarious situation rather than any inherent fickleness or easy calculation that makes this highly intelligent, witty, ardent girl break her vows. As she plays it, it's impossible to remain detached or cynical during the scene where she vacillates painfully over whether to yield to Diomedes. What makes it so affecting is her refusal to be dishonest to herself over what she is doing. Anguished reluctance and clear-eyed pragmatism jostle for supremacy, even in the space of a short phrase like "Troilus farewell" where she intones the name with grief-stricken passion and drops to a bleak matter of factness for these valedictions. . . .

His Troilus offers little in the way of sexual attraction to Victoria Hamilton's pert, quick-silver Cressida. Left to carve out her own part of the equation more or less singlehandedly, she makes a pretty good job of it, pointing up Cressida as only too aware of the vulnerability that sexual passion has for a woman.

. . . Still he has his vivid moments, as does that brilliantly precocious young actress, Victoria Hamilton. In Troy her Cressida is bright, pert, sweet, with a slight undertow of melancholy and, when she is wrested from Troilus and handed to the Greeks, she is clearly a shaken, disoriented girl. But is this enough to explain her sexual defection? Is Ulysses merely voicing 9th-century sexism when he says that "her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body"? Hamilton has the quick intelligence of the survivor, but nothing much is peering from her ankles and elbows, least of all wantonness.

There are moments when a new young artist arrives on a stage and instantly the performance ignites the entire production.

Then you reach for the old superlative cliches. A star is born; an overnight success. Yet these are to trivialise the subtle achievements of Victoria Hamilton in Sir Peter Hall's otherwise curiously stilted production of Ibsen's great monument to male megalomania.

Miss Hamilton redefines the pivotal role of Hilde Wangel, the wild spirit of youth whose arrival symbolises the destruction of the despotic Master Bulder.

Usually Helge is played with swaggering self-importance. Miss Hamilton, on the other hand, equips herself with the strange enchanging vulnerability of extreme youth to match the wild gipsy charms which so delude the man she has set out to bewitch. It is a West End debut of enchanting and radiant freshness. . .

David Nathan, JEWISH CHRONICLE, 20 October 1995 . . . Victoria Hamilton, who left drama school last year, seizes her opportunity. Her Hilde. . . though charged with energy, omits no subtlety. Louise Doughty, MAIL on SUNDAY, 22 October 1995 . . . Hilde - played with sparkling seductiveness by Victoria Hamilton. . .

With her radiantly motivated performance in Ibsen's THE MASTER BUILDER, Victoria Hamilton makes a pact with stardom.

She plays Hilde Wangel, a troll in human shape who literally and symbolically knocks on the door of master builder Solness and overnight kindles the spark that will devour him.

Though there is death in her wake, she is the life force in a drama rich in symbols and shrouded in gloom.

Hamilton's stilletto-sharp responses to the spectrum of moods through which her unpredictable character is filtered will leave you bewitched.

Her besotted victim is played by Alan Bates. As a man haunted by tragedy, Bates creates a convincing portrait of a soul de-sensitised by guilt and pickled in bitterness.

He is less successful in conveying the driven quality that overtakes Solness during his almost mystical relationship with Hilde.

The excellent Gemma Jones plays Bates's emotionally and physically withdrawn wife - a broken woman motivated entirely by "duty".

She and Victoria Hamilton bring to Peter Hall's leisurely, under-stated direction two contrasting studies in female destructiveness. Compelling stuff.

. . . his scenes with Hile Wangel, who comes to free him from this ossuary for the undead, prove as riveting as any I've seen this year.

That says much for Hamilton, who only left drama school last year. She arrives in mountaineering gear, looking like a sprite from an antique folk-tale, and, casually throwing aside an uncomfy boot, proceeds emotionally to dismember and reconstruct the Master Builder. Seldom do you find a young actress who can listen or watch so intently, or fill pauses with such fresh, clear feeling. She gets the character's curt, unpredictable swings of mood, anger to delight. . .

. . . When the younger generation, . . . comes in the provocative shape of Victoria Hamilton's tremendous young Hilde Wangel, it's no surprise she should be set on persuading him to stand tall once again - atop a tower

. . . Victoria Hamilton, one of the most remarkable actresses to emerge in years, subtly makes the unbelievable Hilde real: she comes across as a self-possessed femme fatale whose gravity conceals her rapturous eagerness to destroy. . .

. . . Hilde doesn't represent the kind of professional challenge that the Master Builder has been fearing, though the actress playing her might well cause more than a frisson of such insecurity in the actor playing Solness. It would be especially understandable if, as in Peter Hall's new staging, Hilde were impersonated by a newcomer with the formidable talent of Victoria Hamilton.

Those of us who observed this girl in her first two engagements (both at the Orange Tree) were in nodoubt that here was a future star. Indeed, it's now possible to see her extraordinary performance in James Saunders's Retreat as a dry-run for Hilde. The dramatic function of the Saunders character - who descends, out of the blue, on a middle-aged journalist and old family friend, demanding a home and disturbing the highly precarious balance of his guilt-haunted menage - is strikingly similar to that of Ibsen's heroine, even down to the way both figures seemed to have been summoned out of the protagonist's psyche.

Making brilliant use of that dark-eyed, disquietingly direct gaze of hers, Hamilton plays Hilde as a bewitching child-woman, to a large etent not so much amoral or immoral as pre-moral, before the suffering of Solness's wife gets through to her. There's comedy in her no-nonsense, unnervingly resolute manner: she reports that the 10 years are up and she has returned for her kingdom with a matter-of-fact impatience quiet as though this were some bet they had made five minutes ago and Solness was being rude dragging his heels. Hers is a much less seual rendering of Hilde than is customary, but that doesn't diminish a sense of the liabilities posed by this troll-muse. In the strangulated gurgle of pleasure she emits as Solness determines to climb the tower and in the crazedly elated wave she resumes after the accident, to blank out the knowledge he has fallen, you perceive a dangerous, yet curiously vulnerable, fanatic who will only take risks for her ideals by proxy.. . .

. . . Victoria Hamilton's Hilde, eager and ruthless, innocent but wise, admiring but judgmental, beguiling but frightening, attractive, almost beautiful but oddly asexual, is the perfect complement to the doomed Solness: she really is worth conquering because to conquer her you have to die . . .

. . . The West End debut of Victoria Hamilton is auspicious, however, as she presents Hilde as a smart college girl of a temptress, uncovering the real Solness in less time than it takes Gemma Jones, a stretched elastic band of an Aline, to wring her hands. . .

. . . the outstanding aspect of Peter Hall's new production is Victoria Hamilton's performance as Hilde. It's her first West End role. She strides through the front door, wearing walking boots and carrying a rucksack, with a suddennness and immediacy that is quite unselfconscious. . .

. . . Newcomer Victoria Hamilton is a real find as the wilful Hilde, making her entrance like an uninhibited 19th-century hitch-hiker and endowing this rather fey creature with a turbulent sensuality. . .

. . . the newcomer Victoria Hamilton gives a sensationally good performance as Hilde, the wild child who lures him to his death. As she arrives on stage in her sweatstained walking outfit, she brings an etraordinary unbuttoned seuality into this cold house of buried grief. Better still, she captures the manipulative wiles and childlike petulance of a character Ibsen himself seems to regard with a mixture of lust and terror. . .

. . . Victoria Hamilton's Hilde confirms the promise that she showed when she made her debut earlier this year. at the literal level she can, quite rightly, be exasperating. She bursts on the scene like a New Age traveller; she waves manically after Solness's fatal fall like a fan whose team has scored a goal. But she is more than just "impossible". She persuades you that she really is an angel of death . . .

Hannah (Victoria Hamilton) has the wide-eyed fearfulness of a rabbit frozen in a set of headlights; but as the night wears on her vulnerability becomes messianic zeal as she sets about destroying Harold's protective illusions. "Maybe I've come to redeem you," she says, forcing him to relive the circumstances surrounding the car crash that killed his wife and crippled his daughter. Was he responsible? And what can Hannah, with her hippified clothes, pungent aroma and bouts of tearful hysteria, do to help him? . . . it's Hamilton who really shines, playing Hannah with a striking assurance that belies the fact this is only her second professional stage performance.

Sheridan Morley, SPECTATOR, 27 May 1995 . . . Victoria Hamilton, in whom, almost direct from drama school, the Orange Tree has discovered a star) . . . Simon Read, TIME OUT, 17 May 1995 . . . pretty, honest, fresh talent,Victoria Hamilton . . . Nick Curtis, EVENING STANDARD, 22 May 1995 . . . young Victoria Hamilton, giving a beautifully judged performance as Hannah in her second stage appearance. With her soulful, accusing face and her ability to switch from pugnacious interrogator to bruised child, she's a joy to watch . . .

. . . Victoria Hamilton as Hannah shows a remarkable skill at disquiteing interrogative gazes. She arrives (smelling - in a glorious touch in the intimate Orange Tree space - of patchouli oil), announcing "I've come to disturb your peace," which she achieves both by her insistent questioning of Harold and by her very presence, as an example of a world he cannot understand. Hannah's (occasionally a little too articulate) determintion to set Harold's agenda is the catalyst for him to examine the reasons behind his fierce resistance to such an event. . .

. . . Hamilton is riveting as Hannah. She might be a soiled angel set on redemption or demonic action. Her dark eyes follow Harold everywhere, maybe adoring, maybe predatory. Her instability, equally upsetting and threatening, is encapsulated in a clutched cushion or the scratching of nails round her cut-crystal glass.

. . . there is an outstanding debut by Victoria Hamilton as a shy secretary punished for her misplaced sympathy.

. . . Victoria Hamilton makes an impressive stage debut as a young secretary who refuses to follow the conformist line and is rewarded with dismissal for her courage. . .

. . . as the one innocent in the play Victoria Hamilton, a newcomer, shines like a good deed.

. . . newcomer Victoria Hamilton who has stardom written all over her.

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