THE SIMMERING BROTH FROM "MAD MEN"

It’s hard to remember now, but before 1998 the starrier kind of Hollywood actor was a rarity on the British stage. Then Nicole Kidman got semi-naked in “The Blue Room”, to the sweaty-palmed delight of the papers. Now it’s almost a commonplace: when Jeff Goldblum returned recently for a second stint in the West End, he was only the third interview on BBC Radio 4’s “Midweek” after a female adventurer from Norway and a newspaper cartoonist. Some, though, still whet the appetite. Elisabeth Moss, for example (right), who will be leading “The Children’s Hour”, Lillian Hellman’s cracking schoolma’am melodrama from 1934, which opens this weekend.

Some remember Moss as the president’s daughter in the “West Wing”, but it is Peggy in “Mad Men” that made her. Her performance—a simmering broth of dowdiness, naivety and slow-burn ambition—has earned her two Emmy nominations, for best supporting actress and best leading actress, a measure of the vivid life she has brought to the role. She has earned her laurels on stage, too. In a Broadway revival of Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” a couple of years ago she was Karen, the dogged but driven secretary. The casting director may not have won awards for originality, but critics were thrilled by the way Moss’s crisp wit clarified a character famously muddied by Madonna. So ignore the other big name in “The Children’s Hour” (Keira Knightley, often pancake-flat) and go to see Moss play a closeted lesbian tormented by a lying pupil: it could be just the right canvas for her quiet artfulness.

~ ISABEL LLOYD

The Children’s Hour Comedy Theatre, London, January 22nd to April 2nd; possible Broadway transfer in the autumn