185
between going somewhere else. Matt had
really nice socks on, and I said, ‘You’ve
got really nice socks on.’ And he said,
‘You’re huge!’ And I was like, ‘Yep!’ I did
sort of know when I met him that he was
a nice person.”
As they worked together, a bond
formed and deepened. When filming for
The Crown began, Foy was a relatively
unknown presence; Smith had a much
higher profile in the U.K., thanks to his
stint on Doctor Who. “I had never done
anything like that before,” she says. “He
told me how everything was going to
change and how to cope.” Smith is quick
to brush off suggestions that he gave Foy
much helpful advice about dealing with
fame. “I was just her mate.”
Despite their clear comradeship,
Smith was initially hesitant to commit
to Lungs. When Warchus sent him a
copy of the play, telling him that Foy
had already read and liked it, he said
no. “You do go, ‘Well, should we go
back?’ People have seen us do something
together onscreen... .” He pauses for a
moment. “But hopefully the play and the
story dismiss any ideas of Prince Philip
and Her Majesty.” In the end, the play
itself overcame his doubts. “I phoned
Claire when I was in a park, and she said,
‘We should just do it.’ I said, ‘All right,
then.’ It’s a brilliant, lean, emotional
bit of writing, and it’s mercifully short,
which is good,” he says.
Foy says that trust was tantamount
in putting on this play. “Sometimes with
actors there can be competition or games
people play with one another. But that’s
never a question with us.” Their easy
understanding makes Lungs—which is
essentially one conversation over a peri-
od of years—into a single fluid arc, full
of soul-searching. “It’s like tennis,” says
Smith thoughtfully. “The muscularity
and the back-and-forth of it is the thing
that hopefully people will enjoy.”
There is much to be enjoyed in Lungs,
but there is also the ominous question
that it asks: How should we address the
destruction of the planet? For Macmil-
lan, the fact that Lungs is still so relevant
more than a decade after he first began
writing it, and nine years after its first
production, is sobering. “When it was
written, it was more of a satire about
people like me,” he says. “How over-
anxious, liberal, left-leaning people can
be slightly absurd, talking about climate
change and whether to become parents.
. . . Now I know people who are having
these conversations. . . . It feels as if I
wrote a very paranoid, anxious, dysto-
pian play, and the world just caught up
with my anxiety.”
Though Foy is happily the mother of
a five-year-old, from her former relation-
ship with the actor Stephen Campbell
Moore, she sees the relevance of the play
as well, particularly to women of her
generation. “I felt like it was my own
internal monologue at certain points,”
she says. “I’d never really played some-
one who was just living their normal life.. . . All my female friends who came to
see it really felt that it was something they
recognized themselves in.”
When I ask Smith how he feels about
the question that play poses—the joy
of children versus their incontrovert-
ible negative effect on the Earth—he
responds cautiously. “Some people want
to have five children; some people want
to have one. I personally feel, Have as
many children as you like. Some people
think, Have only one child or no children
anymore because of the planet,” he says.
“But that’s not my perspective.”
Both of these London–based actors
are excited to be bringing Lungs to
BAM. “I’ve always wanted to spend
some time in New York while working
there,” says Smith. “I needed a job,” jokes
Foy. “Before this, I hadn’t worked for 18
months.” This is not strictly true: A film,
Louis Wain, about the 19th-century art-
ist, directed by Will Sharpe—“I’m telling
you now, he’s a genius,” she says of the
director—is due out later this year. Smith
has been busy on Morbius, based on a
vampire character played by Jared Leto.
“I loved it, actually,” he says. “It’s with
the very cool Swedish director Daniel
Espinosa. I love vampires. There is some-
thing terribly stylish about them.” His
voice rises as he exclaims, “It’s good fun
being an actor, it’s challenging, and you
continually get to renew your vocation.”
In an uncanny example of their
empathy, Foy had said something sim-
ilar just hours before, although filtered
through her concern about balancing
her creative life with her responsibili-
ties to her daughter. “I love acting. But
at the same time, I also have had not
to do things, because I don’t want to
feel terrible for missing her first day at
school,” she says. “I don’t know how
anyone does it.... Lungs for me was a
real moment of doing something purely
that I wanted to do; it was so freeing
because I am normally a real preparer
and quite demanding of myself.” Those
demands extend to how she sees the act
of being a mother: “It requires you to
really question everything. You see the
impact of everything you do and say.
That little person is watching how you
treat yourself and how you treat others
and how you treat the world.”
Despite the heaviness of the subject
matter, Lungs is not a work that leaves
its audiences despondent. At the close of
the play, Foy and Smith perform a final,
celebratory dance. “It’s like a thank-you
to the audience. It says, ‘You can always
dance,’” Foy says. “Even when the ice
caps are melting, this is what it means to
be human—to have hope.” @PAST PRESENT
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 165
of Les Halles, the Centre Pompidou,
and the rooftops of Paris. Turning
toward the rotunda’s interior, visitors
will also discover close-up views of
a 360-degree panoramic mural, just
below the cupola’s bottom and painted
by five different artists for the Bourse’s
reopening in 1889. Visible also from the
staircase and the ground-floor rotunda,
the dramatic mural depicts the triumph
of trade across the continents, from
snowy Russia to an emerging New
World and the markets of the East.
“That moment of the Bourse’s reopen-
ing corresponded to the beginnings of
capitalism and globalization, and in a
less positive light to a period of great
colonialism,” Bethenod explains. “It’s
not something we can hide.”
Pierre-Antoine Gatier, an architect
and scholar charged with safeguard-
ing France’s architectural heritage (his
current projects, alongside the Bourse,
include repainting the Eiffel Tower),
concurs. “Our ethic was to accept all
the building’s history,” he says when he
joins us briefly on our tour. The build-
ing’s oldest element dates back to the
Renaissance: a freestanding column
built by Queen Catherine de’ Medici,
whose palace once stood on that site.
A platform at its top may have served
as an observation deck for the queen’s
favorite astrologer.
Gatier says one of his biggest chal-
lenges was researching a historically
accurate color for the cupola’s iron-
work. He finally settled on dove-gray,
which blends harmoniously with the
beiges of the restored, 19th-century
woodwork and the original building’s
Oise limestone, with Ando’s concrete
addition, and with glimpses of the Pari-
sian sky above us.
“Architecture is the reconciliation or
synthesis of opposing concepts,” Ando
has written. The Bourse’s interior, with
its dialogue between centuries, between
cast concrete and hand-carved wood,
between abstraction and figuration, is
both startling and strangely gentle. The
arms of Ando’s concrete cylinder appear
wide open to embrace works of art that