When Tatiana from Killing Eve becomes a bloodthirsty tyrant
We knew her as the icy and magnetic Russian mother in the BBC series Killing Eve… We found her in Cannes, first in 2016 with One Week and a Day by Asaph Polonsky, then last year in official selection in Mama by Or Sinai, where she plays the role of a Ukrainian mother immigrated to Israel with a precision and nuances that leave you speechless. But it’s on stage, and in the role of a man, a bloodthirsty, hunchbacked, limping, manipulative king, that she has become essential for the French audience.
A historic Richard III
In Richard III at Théâtre Gesher directed by Itay Tiran at the National Stage of Gémeaux in Sceaux, she enters on a single high heel and from then on the stage is hers. The set is black and white, checkered for the bloodthirsty tyrant, tables, chairs, lights, and projections in an atmosphere reminiscent of the great theaters of Eastern Europe in the 2000s, from Warlikowski to Serebrennikov. Around her, the fifteen actors of Gesher excel in acting, singing, dancing, with an oscillation from the church choir to the traditional hora. But it is her that one cannot take the eyes off, feverish, playing with the graves and severed heads with a precise and wicked jubilation that mesmerizes the audience, dressed as a man, but worse than all the femme fatales in the Bible combined. After three hours, it becomes clear that Evgenia Dodina is playing to awaken us to what is happening in her country. A country she has adopted and which adores her: Israel.
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From Mogilev to Tel Aviv: a life of twists
She was born on December 10, 1964 in Mogilev in Soviet Belarus, trained at the Moscow Academy of Arts, she joined the Maïkovski Theater where she met director Yevgeny Aryeh. It was with him and a handful of actors that she crossed the Mediterranean in the early 1990s to found the Gesher Theater in Tel Aviv (which means “the bridge”). She performed before even knowing how to speak Hebrew and worked on pronunciation in a language she did not yet master. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Medea, the repertoire is immense and she navigates through it with ease, earning her the Actress of the Year award at the Israeli Theatre Awards two years in a row, in 2001 and 2002. She then moved on to Habima, the legendary national theater, where she portrayed Anna Karenina, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Chekhov’s Three Sisters. In 2012, a coproduction with the Residenztheater in Munich around Bergman’s Persona solidified her reputation as an international star. So much so that from 2020 to 2024, she is a permanent member of the Staatstheater Stuttgart ensemble, one of Germany’s most demanding theaters. There, she learns her roles in German without speaking the language, as she had done in Hebrew thirty years earlier. Her role in 2020 in the BBC series Killing Eve further solidified her status as an international star.
Honors and success
Israel has crowned her one of its beloved actresses. She works incessantly and perhaps plays all the Russian and Slavic women that the country has wanted to see on screen! For this work, she received six nominations for the Ophir, the Israeli Oscars. But also an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University in 2010. And in 2009, she was the one to light the flame at Mount Herzl for the 61st anniversary of the State of Israel, “for her contribution to Hebrew theater.” Festivals also recognize her talents: in Haifa, she won the Best Actress award for Invisible by Michal Aviad in 2011. And at the Jewish Film Festival in Warsaw, she was also awarded for embodying the great lady of Hebrew theater Hannah Rovina in To Be or Not To Be.
The brilliance of an inclassable chameleon
Whether as a man or a woman, as a mother or a tyrant, what defines Evgenia Dodina remains elusive: somewhere between Russia and Israel, sensual and timeless, passionate and intellectual. The actress is even more fascinating as an absolute chameleon who moves from a Hebrew Shakespeare to a BBC series without missing a beat. We can expect to see her soon in Etty, the series by Hagai Levi, the creator of In Treatment, co-produced by Arte and presented out of competition at the Venice Film Festival but also at Séries Mania. She portrays the mother of Etty Hillesum, the young Dutch Jewish woman whose diaries have become a monument in Holocaust literature. Another complex mother. We have no doubt and look forward to discovering her in this role…
To read our review of Richard III at the National Stage of Sceaux, Les Gémeaux, click here.
