Post by Queen Mab on Jul 30, 2010 8:38:43 GMT
Rising star Mariah Gale talks to Richard McComb about the RSC – and being David Tennant’s on-stage lover.
The sun-baked centre of Stratford-upon-Avon is teeming with tourists licking dribbley ice creams as they attempt to take photos of anything with a fleeting reference to Shakespeare.
It is high summer in Bardsville and foreign students are jostling for position with congo lines of American and Japanese trophy hunters.
They all want a slice of a man who shuffled off his mortal coil more than five centuries ago. No stone, gift shop, tea room or birthplace museum is left unturned.
No one notices the appearance of a dramatic heroine in their very midst. But then she’s probably not what they would expect: no bodice, no ruff, no poisoned chalice.
Enter, stage left, an impishly attractive young woman dressed in a fitted leather jacket, a short, dark-blue print dress and unlaced, designer-scuffed bovver boots. Gold sunshades are tucked into her long, brown hair.
She passes through the crowds unremarked, which is strange because as every fourth former knows: “Juliet is the sun.”
Mariah Gale is playing Miss Capulet – among several other roles – as part of a three-year stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s long ensemble.
As we walk through the old town, looking at the Shakespeare throng, I tell her I am tempted to tell the sightseers that here, at my side, is Juliet herself, made flesh and blood.
“I could tell them, ‘This is the real Juliet. She’s with me,’” I say.
Mariah’s bright demeanour dims. Colour drains from her gently tanned complexion. Unless I am mistaken, there is a shudder. “Oh, please don’t,” she says, pleading.
Fear of public exposure runs deep in the acting fraternity and so it is with Mariah, who looks considerably younger than her 30 years.
Actually, I’m feeling quite bad now. She is quiet and guarded in conversation but she leaves the impression she likes to let her hair down, given the right company.
Her nickname is Minnie and she makes a thoroughly modern Juliet, vulnerability, flirtatiousness and youth anchored by a fierce intelligence.
Mariah says she was shy as a child and that is why she fell in love with acting. She recalls being 14 and there was an improvised drama class at school. “I was playing the school dinner lady and she was brash. I really got into it. I thought it was fun and I wanted to do more of it.”
We are talking over lunch at Bernadettes seafood restaurant, dining al fresco on the roof terrace, away from Stratford’s madding crowd.
Mariah orders sparkling mineral water, so I follow suit. The RSC, it transpires, has a strict alcohol and drugs policy and although she is off duty today, Mariah does not want to come across as a lush.
Shame. Still, she joins me in a glass of white later.
Over whitebait (her) and langoustine (me), Mariah fills me in on her latest associaion with the RSC, her third, which comes to an end next summer, in New York, during the company’s 50th anniversary bash.
I tell her how I took my daughters, 11 and 14, to see her in Romeo and Juliet. It was their first “big” Shakespeare show.
Noting their ages, Mariah says: “That’s great. Juliet is so about them. It’s the perfect time for them to see it.”
She has been playing the role less frequently of late, focusing on portraying the Lady of the Lake in Morte d’Arthur, but she returned to Juliet after a month’s absence just a few days before our interview.
She says the experience was “surreal,” running through the lines again, “dragging them up from some compartment of our minds.”
“It was thrilling because there was an added level of adrenaline. We were quite worried we would forget the big dance,” she says, referring to the spectacularly choreographed set piece when Juliet first claps eyes on the love of her short life.
“I had forgotten how energetic the dance was. Everyone has said that it is their favourite moment of the production. Everyone is together. Sometimes you have dances in shows that are really hard work whereas this one feels like genuine abandon. It is just like having a party.”
Mariah, the second daughter of two architects – her mother, Lyn, is Australian – studied drama and theatre arts at Birmingham University, switching her time between extra-curricular student productions (“They almost threatened to swamp my academic life at one point”) and gastronomic late breakfasts at the Selly Sausage cafe in bedsit land. She later attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
While she was in Birmingham, she often visited Stratford, sitting in the cheap seats, widening her knowledge of Shakespearean texts and soaking up performance styles.
Antony Sher’s Macbeth, at The Swan in 1999, made a huge impression on her. “I remember the moment where Macbeth has just murdered Duncan and he say, ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more ...’ I’d seen the play before and always seen people tear it to shreds in a way, make it a huge emotional gesture. It was so brilliant because for Antony it was just a factual statement and I really got the shivers. I believed he wouldn’t sleep again. It was chillingly real. I think that is when I fell in love with Shakespeare.”
Talking of love, Mariah’s boyfriend Charles Aitkin is coincidentally in the RSC ensemble. They met through mutual friends at Birmingham University and RADA. That was three years ago.
It must be serious, I say.
“Don’t ask that question,” says Mariah, laughing.
Why not?
“Difficult question ...”
I suspect the answer may lie in what Mariah tells me later when I ask her about the particular challenges, if there are any, of being a woman in theatreland. As I’ve said, she does look a very young 30 and could pass for a late teen. Certainly her appearance as the 13-year-old Juliet doesn’t jar.
The onset of “second childishness and mere oblivion” is a world away, but the clock is ticking and this woman’s thoughts have touched on the possibilities of another more permanent role: motherhood.
“I always respect a woman who has carved a career for herself in the arts. I think you have to be quiet courageous to do it. I think there are different pressures to men,” she says.
“I have turned 30 and there is a pressure to settle down and have a family and it is hard to marry that instinct and your professional drive. It can be quite confusing.
“My parents are very liberal and they have always told me and my sister we should go for what we want and be driven career-wise. They have not pushed us but they have told us we can do what we want.
“I would really like to have a family. But how does that fit in with wanting to have this incredible career? Hopefully, you can have both but I don’t know really.”
Mariah was thrilled to be asked by the RSC to play both Juliet and Ophelia in Greg Doran’s Hamlet. It’s a daunting double-header.
She says: “When I first started rehearsing for Ophelia I thought, ‘Oh, God, I don’t know why they have given me this job. I don’t have any ideas.’ I read it and I was baffled. I didn’t know who she was.
“As we looked more deeply into it, I fell in love with the character. I found it really liberating playing Ophelia which is strange because ultimately she dies. But she dies in a blaze of glory, to my mind. I think she is a really brave person.”
Although she had won critical acclaim for earlier roles, mostly notably for Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Southwark Playhouse in 2005, it was the role of Hamlet’s lover that catapulted her into the media spotlight in 2008. The lead was taken by David Tennant, fresh from Doctor Who super-stardom.
Mariah knew Tennant had already been cast and admits to being on edge when she first met the former Time Lord.
“It was scary, but it becomes not scary very quickly because you start working together intensely. I have so much respect for him as an actor. He was very lovely to me and very respectful. It’s nice when you appreciate what you can each bring to the show. It was really sad when we finished. The whole cast got on really well.”
They went to a Covent Garden restaurant for a late dinner on the last night.
“David was there with his girlfriend. They kind of snuck off at the end of the night and everyone was like ‘I didn’t get to say goodbye to David.’
And then the waitress came over and we asked for the bill and she said, ‘No, it’s been paid.’ He’d snuck off because he’d paid for everyone. It was lovely.”
Our lunch, incidentally, is going swimmingly. When I set up the location for the interview, I was worried Mariah might be a new age actress and would insist on a plate of organic raw vegetables and a body-temperature glass of wheatgrass.
Fortunately, she is tucking into her grilled lemon sole with spinach, goats cheese ravioli and chorizo. She’s got that mildly irritating American habit of eating with a fork, sans knife, as Shakespeare might have said. But I can forgive her and, what’s more, I’ve got a lovely plate of wild sea bass with choucroute, brown shrimps, dinky croutons and lemon beurre noisette.
The idyll is broken by a duo of dive-bombing wasps. I don’t want the leading lady to get stung so I valiantly flap with a menu card; it’s functional, rather than heroic, but Bernadette’s is short on lances. It must have been nerve-shredding working with Tennant. Critics always sharpen their pencils when big names take to the stage.
Mariah, though, says she never reads her reviews and, if anything, found the cultural hype attached to the role of Juliet greater than that of Ophelia.
She says: “I have found Juliet the hardest to let go of that fear of being in the spotlight. When you first leave drama school, you have this wonderful anonymity where you have no expectation of yourself and no one has any expectations of you.
‘‘It is a wonderful freedom and it is quite scary when you think, ‘The play’s called Romeo and Juliet and I’m playing Juliet. People will have expectations and that can be a little bit overwhelming.”
It is not, she adds, a matter of life and death. Mariah is an artist, but she is grounded.
“People would laugh if I said it was a demanding job. We’re not saving lives are we? It’s all fun,” she says. “But the hours are long. You start rehearsing at 10 in the morning. You will have an hour off for lunch. You will rehearse all day and then all you have time to do is walk to the theatre, get in a queue for dinner in the green room, eat your dinner, and do a fight call and a dance call and a vocal warm up and get into your costume and get into wigs and then you do the show.
“You finish at 10.45. It’s quite all consuming. You normally go to the Dirty Duck pub after the show. They’ll always be someone in there. Then it’s bed – and time to get back for rehearsals. You have lines to learn in between. You’ve got a lot of thinking to do about your characters.
“My friends in London, when I go up to Stratford, say, ‘Right, we’ll see you in seven months.’ Because it does take over, but I don’t mind that.”
www.birminghampost.net/life-leisure-birmingham-guide/birmingham-culture/theatre-in-birmingham/2010/07/30/unknown-65233-26949941/
The sun-baked centre of Stratford-upon-Avon is teeming with tourists licking dribbley ice creams as they attempt to take photos of anything with a fleeting reference to Shakespeare.
It is high summer in Bardsville and foreign students are jostling for position with congo lines of American and Japanese trophy hunters.
They all want a slice of a man who shuffled off his mortal coil more than five centuries ago. No stone, gift shop, tea room or birthplace museum is left unturned.
No one notices the appearance of a dramatic heroine in their very midst. But then she’s probably not what they would expect: no bodice, no ruff, no poisoned chalice.
Enter, stage left, an impishly attractive young woman dressed in a fitted leather jacket, a short, dark-blue print dress and unlaced, designer-scuffed bovver boots. Gold sunshades are tucked into her long, brown hair.
She passes through the crowds unremarked, which is strange because as every fourth former knows: “Juliet is the sun.”
Mariah Gale is playing Miss Capulet – among several other roles – as part of a three-year stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s long ensemble.
As we walk through the old town, looking at the Shakespeare throng, I tell her I am tempted to tell the sightseers that here, at my side, is Juliet herself, made flesh and blood.
“I could tell them, ‘This is the real Juliet. She’s with me,’” I say.
Mariah’s bright demeanour dims. Colour drains from her gently tanned complexion. Unless I am mistaken, there is a shudder. “Oh, please don’t,” she says, pleading.
Fear of public exposure runs deep in the acting fraternity and so it is with Mariah, who looks considerably younger than her 30 years.
Actually, I’m feeling quite bad now. She is quiet and guarded in conversation but she leaves the impression she likes to let her hair down, given the right company.
Her nickname is Minnie and she makes a thoroughly modern Juliet, vulnerability, flirtatiousness and youth anchored by a fierce intelligence.
Mariah says she was shy as a child and that is why she fell in love with acting. She recalls being 14 and there was an improvised drama class at school. “I was playing the school dinner lady and she was brash. I really got into it. I thought it was fun and I wanted to do more of it.”
We are talking over lunch at Bernadettes seafood restaurant, dining al fresco on the roof terrace, away from Stratford’s madding crowd.
Mariah orders sparkling mineral water, so I follow suit. The RSC, it transpires, has a strict alcohol and drugs policy and although she is off duty today, Mariah does not want to come across as a lush.
Shame. Still, she joins me in a glass of white later.
Over whitebait (her) and langoustine (me), Mariah fills me in on her latest associaion with the RSC, her third, which comes to an end next summer, in New York, during the company’s 50th anniversary bash.
I tell her how I took my daughters, 11 and 14, to see her in Romeo and Juliet. It was their first “big” Shakespeare show.
Noting their ages, Mariah says: “That’s great. Juliet is so about them. It’s the perfect time for them to see it.”
She has been playing the role less frequently of late, focusing on portraying the Lady of the Lake in Morte d’Arthur, but she returned to Juliet after a month’s absence just a few days before our interview.
She says the experience was “surreal,” running through the lines again, “dragging them up from some compartment of our minds.”
“It was thrilling because there was an added level of adrenaline. We were quite worried we would forget the big dance,” she says, referring to the spectacularly choreographed set piece when Juliet first claps eyes on the love of her short life.
“I had forgotten how energetic the dance was. Everyone has said that it is their favourite moment of the production. Everyone is together. Sometimes you have dances in shows that are really hard work whereas this one feels like genuine abandon. It is just like having a party.”
Mariah, the second daughter of two architects – her mother, Lyn, is Australian – studied drama and theatre arts at Birmingham University, switching her time between extra-curricular student productions (“They almost threatened to swamp my academic life at one point”) and gastronomic late breakfasts at the Selly Sausage cafe in bedsit land. She later attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
While she was in Birmingham, she often visited Stratford, sitting in the cheap seats, widening her knowledge of Shakespearean texts and soaking up performance styles.
Antony Sher’s Macbeth, at The Swan in 1999, made a huge impression on her. “I remember the moment where Macbeth has just murdered Duncan and he say, ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more ...’ I’d seen the play before and always seen people tear it to shreds in a way, make it a huge emotional gesture. It was so brilliant because for Antony it was just a factual statement and I really got the shivers. I believed he wouldn’t sleep again. It was chillingly real. I think that is when I fell in love with Shakespeare.”
Talking of love, Mariah’s boyfriend Charles Aitkin is coincidentally in the RSC ensemble. They met through mutual friends at Birmingham University and RADA. That was three years ago.
It must be serious, I say.
“Don’t ask that question,” says Mariah, laughing.
Why not?
“Difficult question ...”
I suspect the answer may lie in what Mariah tells me later when I ask her about the particular challenges, if there are any, of being a woman in theatreland. As I’ve said, she does look a very young 30 and could pass for a late teen. Certainly her appearance as the 13-year-old Juliet doesn’t jar.
The onset of “second childishness and mere oblivion” is a world away, but the clock is ticking and this woman’s thoughts have touched on the possibilities of another more permanent role: motherhood.
“I always respect a woman who has carved a career for herself in the arts. I think you have to be quiet courageous to do it. I think there are different pressures to men,” she says.
“I have turned 30 and there is a pressure to settle down and have a family and it is hard to marry that instinct and your professional drive. It can be quite confusing.
“My parents are very liberal and they have always told me and my sister we should go for what we want and be driven career-wise. They have not pushed us but they have told us we can do what we want.
“I would really like to have a family. But how does that fit in with wanting to have this incredible career? Hopefully, you can have both but I don’t know really.”
Mariah was thrilled to be asked by the RSC to play both Juliet and Ophelia in Greg Doran’s Hamlet. It’s a daunting double-header.
She says: “When I first started rehearsing for Ophelia I thought, ‘Oh, God, I don’t know why they have given me this job. I don’t have any ideas.’ I read it and I was baffled. I didn’t know who she was.
“As we looked more deeply into it, I fell in love with the character. I found it really liberating playing Ophelia which is strange because ultimately she dies. But she dies in a blaze of glory, to my mind. I think she is a really brave person.”
Although she had won critical acclaim for earlier roles, mostly notably for Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Southwark Playhouse in 2005, it was the role of Hamlet’s lover that catapulted her into the media spotlight in 2008. The lead was taken by David Tennant, fresh from Doctor Who super-stardom.
Mariah knew Tennant had already been cast and admits to being on edge when she first met the former Time Lord.
“It was scary, but it becomes not scary very quickly because you start working together intensely. I have so much respect for him as an actor. He was very lovely to me and very respectful. It’s nice when you appreciate what you can each bring to the show. It was really sad when we finished. The whole cast got on really well.”
They went to a Covent Garden restaurant for a late dinner on the last night.
“David was there with his girlfriend. They kind of snuck off at the end of the night and everyone was like ‘I didn’t get to say goodbye to David.’
And then the waitress came over and we asked for the bill and she said, ‘No, it’s been paid.’ He’d snuck off because he’d paid for everyone. It was lovely.”
Our lunch, incidentally, is going swimmingly. When I set up the location for the interview, I was worried Mariah might be a new age actress and would insist on a plate of organic raw vegetables and a body-temperature glass of wheatgrass.
Fortunately, she is tucking into her grilled lemon sole with spinach, goats cheese ravioli and chorizo. She’s got that mildly irritating American habit of eating with a fork, sans knife, as Shakespeare might have said. But I can forgive her and, what’s more, I’ve got a lovely plate of wild sea bass with choucroute, brown shrimps, dinky croutons and lemon beurre noisette.
The idyll is broken by a duo of dive-bombing wasps. I don’t want the leading lady to get stung so I valiantly flap with a menu card; it’s functional, rather than heroic, but Bernadette’s is short on lances. It must have been nerve-shredding working with Tennant. Critics always sharpen their pencils when big names take to the stage.
Mariah, though, says she never reads her reviews and, if anything, found the cultural hype attached to the role of Juliet greater than that of Ophelia.
She says: “I have found Juliet the hardest to let go of that fear of being in the spotlight. When you first leave drama school, you have this wonderful anonymity where you have no expectation of yourself and no one has any expectations of you.
‘‘It is a wonderful freedom and it is quite scary when you think, ‘The play’s called Romeo and Juliet and I’m playing Juliet. People will have expectations and that can be a little bit overwhelming.”
It is not, she adds, a matter of life and death. Mariah is an artist, but she is grounded.
“People would laugh if I said it was a demanding job. We’re not saving lives are we? It’s all fun,” she says. “But the hours are long. You start rehearsing at 10 in the morning. You will have an hour off for lunch. You will rehearse all day and then all you have time to do is walk to the theatre, get in a queue for dinner in the green room, eat your dinner, and do a fight call and a dance call and a vocal warm up and get into your costume and get into wigs and then you do the show.
“You finish at 10.45. It’s quite all consuming. You normally go to the Dirty Duck pub after the show. They’ll always be someone in there. Then it’s bed – and time to get back for rehearsals. You have lines to learn in between. You’ve got a lot of thinking to do about your characters.
“My friends in London, when I go up to Stratford, say, ‘Right, we’ll see you in seven months.’ Because it does take over, but I don’t mind that.”
www.birminghampost.net/life-leisure-birmingham-guide/birmingham-culture/theatre-in-birmingham/2010/07/30/unknown-65233-26949941/
