Interview: Helena Blackman

Helena Blackman chats to West End Frame about her upcoming roles in Impotent at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre and Ivor Novello’s final musical Gay’s The Word at the Jermyn Street Theatre. 

Since coming second on Andrew Lloyd Webber's first casting TV show How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria, Helena has had an exciting career, performing in productions all over the world. She also released her debut album, The Sound of Rodgers & Hammerstein.

Are you looking forward to starring in Impotent at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre? 

Very much so, it’s a new venue for me and I hear very good things about the kind of work that takes place there. I’m really supportive of these intimate and unique spaces and feel the show will be well received there. 

What is the show all about? 

It focuses on the intricacies of romantic relationships of the staff who work and the patients who visit a Genitourinary Clinic in Leicestershire. The majority of the relationships described are dysfunctional but truthful to the extent that we have probably all experienced at some point in our lives. 

Helena Blackman to star in Impotent at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre

Impotent, a new play by Matt Reed, directed by Graham Hubbard (Priscilla, Sweeney Todd, Mack and Mabel, Sound of Music-All West End), will premiere at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town early next year. The play will from from 8th January until 26th January 2013. The production stars Helena Blackman, runner up of BBCs 'How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria' as Dr Zoe Lane.

Impotent is a pitch-black comedy drama set in the murky world of a Market Harborough Genito-Urinary Medicine Department. Five men at different stages of their life and different stages of treatment for impotence are seen individually undergoing treatment with Dr Zoë Lane, a woman who has to penetrate, interpret and reprogramme the misfiring, and frequently overwired brains of her patients. Her patients are a mixture of men for whom sex is any or all of a reward, a curse, a threat, a justification and punishment.