The British actress and star of Garrow’s Law tells Matthew Amer how appearing in new play Greenland has been a life-changing event.
“I can’t think of anything worse after work than going to see that. How boring.” It is safe to assume that this was not the response actress Lyndsey Marshal was hoping for when she told her mum about her latest project, the new climate change play Greenland at the National Theatre. Still, if a parent can’t be blunt with you, who can?
Delightful lack of tact aside, the Marshal matriarch may have a point. Describe a new play as exploring the implications of man’s effect on the environment and climate change and, for all but those already signed up to the environmental agenda, it conjures thoughts of a worthy diatribe about the man-made destruction of the earth. I have nothing against diatribes, but after a long day in the office it is not how I normally choose to relax.
“It’s about getting that balance right, not lecturing the audience,” says Marshal, who understands precisely where her mum was coming from. “But when you relate it to people and to characters and to relationships, you’re more willing to engage, naturally.”
As if creating a new piece exploring one of the most pressing questions of our time was not ambitious enough, the National Theatre pushed itself further in the way the play was put together: “There’s four writers – Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne – we’ve got Ben Power as dramaturg and Bijan Sheibani’s directing it, 15 in the cast, plastic, fire, snow, sun, tables, wheelie chairs, chaos… It’s like your brain’s melting.”
The diminutive actress, whose last stage appearances came in The Pride at the Royal Court and Three Days Of Rain in the West End, looks a touch harrowed and worn out following a morning of rehearsals. As she joins me in the National’s interview snug she clutches a pot of carrot sticks – she is purging after winter excess – which, I suspect, won’t be as restorative a lunch as she needs. The cast has been in rehearsals six days a week for the last nine weeks, devising sections of the show, exploring how the different writers’ work fits together on stage, incorporating rewrites on the spot.
“… plastic, fire, snow, sun, tables, wheelie chairs, chaos…”
“There have been days when it’s just daunting,” she admits, “where I’m just knackered, I can’t devise any more, I can’t think any more, I can’t see another map or another statistic or another quote, I just want to rehearse the play, but there is no play and I have no block and I don’t know where I am, I don’t know what I’m going to be wearing. There have been days when you get really depressed, when you’ve actually seen what will happen and you look at the statistics and you look at the maps and the question of bringing children into this world. It’s terrifying. There’ve been dark days.”
When put like that, it sounds rather torturous, though Marshal prefers to use “challenging”. In fact, amid the gloom of the environmental statistics and the test of devising while simultaneously working with a quartet of writers, a dramaturg and a director, Marshal is enjoying being part of a company again and sings the praises of her colleagues.
Her last engagement at the National Theatre, Kneehigh’s A Matter Of Life And Death, though far more flippant in tone, had a similar company feel and air of devised creativity.
“You just make a wally of yourself,” she says of the devising process whereby the company draws on its own ideas for the show, rather than working from a set script. “You get used to not being precious in front of one another very, very quickly. It’s very exposing, but quite quickly it creates this feeling that you can’t do anything wrong, that there’s no wrong, and then you get a lot of support.”
Marshal actually agreed to join the Greenland cast having read only one scene, so tempting was the proposition of returning to the South Bank in a show that scared her a little. What has since been created, based on a variety of interviews performed by the show’s creators, is a piece full of different stories exploring man’s relationship with the planet. Its characters range from a scientist to a protesting teenager and from a man who has spent 40 years counting guillemots – presumably they don’t share the sleep-inducing qualities of sheep – to Marshal’s character, who works for Ed Miliband. Some are real people, some invented.
“I think,” Marshal admits truthfully, “like most plays I’ve done it’s not going to be a universal ‘Yeah, we love it’. I think it’s going to divide people, but that’s what I like about it.”
“I think it’s going to divide people, but that’s what I like about it”
Those fans of Marshal who have not known what to do with themselves since the end of the last series of the BBC’s historical legal drama Garrow’s Law, in which she plays Lady Sarah Hill, will be delighted to know that in addition to her current stage outing she can also be seen on the big screen later this month in the Clint Eastwood-directed drama Hereafter.
The Hollywood A-lister is, she confirms, a “complete legend”, but Marshal’s movie success – she also appeared in the multi-award winning film The Hours – will not see the British star uprooting to LA. She tried that last year and “absolutely hated it”.
“It just wasn’t for me. I think I was honeyed by this feeling of ‘yeah, go out and be in Mad Men’, but we [in the UK] only see the cream of the crop, we get what is really, really good; you go out there and there is loads of s**t as well.”
“But there are so many opportunities,” she continues. “[In the US] actors are much better paid than we are here. The UK Film Council’s gone and with cuts to the arts, this is what makes me really sad; we’ve got such a wealth of British talent here, but you can’t complain when someone goes over and does a series there because, as an actor, you know exactly why they’re doing it; you can do that and you can buy a house over here. I don’t mean to be depressing, but it’s a reality.”
Part of me – the selfish part that enjoys her work – is glad to hear Marshal say that she won’t be departing for the US any time soon. She is a performer who, since making her professional stage debut at the Royal Court in 2000’s Fireface, has quietly been building a hugely varied CV of quality work. On screen she has played Cleopatra in the BBC/HBO epic drama Rome, a torn geneticist in occult drama Being Human and the corseted campaigner Lady Sarah in Garrow’s Law, while also collecting film roles and theatre credits in the West End and on London’s most sought after stages. She doesn’t, however, have anything lined up for when Greenland’s run at the National comes to an end later this summer, not even Garrow, the return of which she has not heard anything about. But she is happy enough at the moment that this does not worry her in the slightest.
In fact, working on Greenland has even brought about a change in lifestyle, the actress changing “the little things that if we all did it would make a difference”. She has been checking the providence of her fruit and veg, turning her mobile phone charger off and not leaving her TV on standby. “I took my own carrier bags to the supermarket yesterday,” she smiles, before heading back, carrots in hand, into the hectic world of rehearsals.
MA