James McAvoy is magnetic in caustic class comedy

DIGITAL SPY
By Kate GoodacreWednesday,
Jan 28 2015, 7:01pm EST

Serena Evans as Lady Claire, James McAvoy as Jack and Kathryn Drysdale as Grace

Originally penned in an era between the Profumo and Jellicoe political scandals, Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class is a caustic, uncompromising and deeply underrated character study. Anyone who may have feared that its notions of rigid hierarchy, polite expectation, jumped-up patriotism and reactionary politics would be outdated in the 21st century need not worry.

Trafalgar Transformed's artistic director Jamie Lloyd has reunited with James McAvoy for The Ruling Class following their successful reinterpretation of Macbeth at Trafalgar Studios in early 2013, and McAvoy's troubled Jack - who becomes the 14th Earl of Gurney after his father dies in an unusual accident - is a supremely skilled orator.

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, the 14th Earl believes he is another kind of Lord entirely, returning to the family seat after seven years away proclaiming himself to be the resurrection and the life. Jack argues his case with the skill and duplicity - deliberate or otherwise - of a politician on the Radio 4 Today program, most notably when he's trying to convince his family that his fictional wife actually exists in a bid to avoid being married off.

McAvoy clearly relishes the opportunity to work with a surreal script packed with puns, innuendo and intricate wordplay, and his silver-tongued delivery and performance oozes with the kind of easy charm that these days wins votes and election to the seat of power. He breaks the fourth wall at regular intervals with a glint in his eye, at one point quipping: "What a lovely crowd. God bless you."

Mental illness doesn't care for class or background or breeding, and for all of the mania so skilfully and physically portrayed by McAvoy, it's the quieter moments that leave the greatest impact.

When Jack laments that his greatest regret is his "many wasted years", it's sentiment that may well resonate with many who have experienced the black dog's indiscriminate grip first-hand. The 14th Earl's quiet crisis at the end of the first act as all his safety mechanisms collapse around him, his responsibilities as a husband and father really hit home, and the brutal, real world around him reveals itself, is utterly chilling. You can't help but feel for him in that moment.

Elsewhere Joshua McGuire - recently seen as John Ruskin in Mike Leigh's Mr Turner - is note-perfect as simpering, snivelling, self-serving Conservative politician Dinsdale, Jack's cousin, while Anthony O'Donnell (as communist Gurney family butler Daniel Tucker) and Elliot Levey (Jack's psychiatrist Dr Herder) also turn in magnificent performances.


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James McAvoy & Mark Ruffalo Ride Unicycles on The Graham Norton Show, Impress Meryl Streep—Watch the Video!

E!
by CORINNE HELLER
January 9, 2015



The Hulk and Professor Xavier, you have impressed the queen!

In a joint appearance on the BBC's The Graham Norton Show that aired on Friday, Meryl Streep, aka the luckiest woman ever, got to not only share a sofa with Mark Ruffalo, who plays the green superhero in The Avengers series, and X-Men actor James McAvoy, but also watch them from a prime seat as they entertained her, and the world, by riding unicycles. The Oscar-winning actress appeared astonished, and maybe a little, well, freaked out...especially when the latter star took a spill onstage.

McAvoy is set to star in a revival of the British comedy play The Ruling Class in London's West End, starting on Jan. 16. The Scottish star said on The Graham Norton Show that his character has to ride a unicycle on stage. Host Graham Norton talked about how Ruffalo, who stars in the new movie Foxcatcher, had demonstrated his unicycle-riding skills during a previous appearance on the program in 2014.

"How do you know how to do that?" Streep asked Ruffalo.

"I wanted to be a clown," the actor replied. "That was my dream."

READ MORE HERE: http://www.eonline.com/news/613119/james-mcavoy-mark-ruffalo-ride-unicycles-on-the-graham-norton-show-impress-meryl-streep-watch-the-video

Five great Jack the Ripper Films

By: Kevin Wicks Posted: Monday, October 17th, 2011

Johnny Depp in 'From Hell'

The notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper brought a reign of carnage to the Whitechapel neighborhood of London in the late 1880s, terrifying the city and capturing the attention of people all over the globe. BBC America’s new crime drama, Whitechapel — premiering Wednesday, October 26th at 10/9c — Detective Joseph Chandler (Rupert Penry-Jones) investigates what appear to be modern-day copycat crimes inspired by those century-old murders.
In lieu of the crimes being solved, Hollywood has repeatedly sought to tell the tale of the Ripper, with fictionalized accounts going back as early as the silent era. Here are four films (and one TV miniseries) that took on the sordid story:

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
Of course Alfred Hitchcock did a Jack the Ripper movie. (The British filmmaker and the story of the Ripper go together like foie gras and apple compote.) This 1927 silent thriller, the first adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes‘s novel, starred Welsh actor Ivor Novello as the titular lodger wrongly suspected of committing Ripper-like murders. It was Hitchcock’s first commercial success.


A Study in Terror
This 1965 film put Sherlock Holmes (John Neville) and Dr. Watson (Donald Houston) on the tail of Jack the Ripper. And in this one, our crack crime solvers actually determine the identity of the killer.


The Ruling Class
Not a Ripper film per se, but a very dark comedy (from 1972) starring the sublime Peter O’Toole as a mentally disturbed earl who believes he is Jack the Ripper. Here’s Mr. O’Toole putting on an acting clinic, and, at around 3:43, letting out a primal scream that will absolutely liquefy your bowels:


Jack the Ripper
This Golden Globe-winning 1988 miniseries starred Michael Caine as Detective Abberline, the real-life investigator into the Ripper murders. The trailer, which is truly camptastic in a great way, features Caine doing his best Michael Caine, Jane Seymour purring flirtatiously, and a creepy Armand Assante scowling like a young Peter Lorre.



From Hell
Based on Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell‘s graphic novel about the Ripper case, this 2001 film starred Johnny Depp as the opium-addicted Detective Abberline and took the Hughes brothers off the streets of South Central (where they directed their 1993 hit Menace II Society) to the equally alarming “ghettos” of late 19th century London. Roger Ebert wrote, in his three-star review, “Despite its murders, it’s not a slasher film. What it is, I think, is a Guignol about a cross-section of a thoroughly rotten society, corrupted from the top down. The Ripper murders cut through layers of social class designed to insulate the sinners from the results of their sins.”



What is your favorite Jack the Ripper movie?

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