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| Channel 4 drama with Hermione Norris [from Cold Feet], where she plays an abused wife and I play her best friend |
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| Tamsin Greig: she’s a spoon She says she found her balls in Stratford, but no doubt Tamsin Greig will be checking they’re still there today as she gets ready to face a London audience in Much Ado About Nothing this evening. When she chatted to me the other day she was up in Newcastle where the play was having a bit of a test-run out of the comfy confines of Stratford before hitting the capital. I thought I’d share her thoughts on this and a couple of other things. How are you feeling about coming to London? TG: We are having to re-rehearse it because it’s not a thrust stage anymore, we’re going into the Novello which is a pros-arch, so we’re having to rethink the motion of the play, which I think is a good thing, you know. When you’ve done a play for seven months you can get a bit flabby and a bit loose and complacent, so I think it will be very good to just sharpen it up and give it a new perspective. In Newcastle the audiences have been slightly on the back foot, like ‘come on, just draw us in here’, whereas the Stratford audiences are much more au fait with the play and the language and the whole Shakespeare thing and they are really up for it. So I think Newcastle has been a really good preparation for a slightly more back foot audience in London, who, you know, could go to any theatre they wanted to, so it’s a bit like ‘yeah, come on prove yourself’. **** In our chat, she talked a lot about her character Beatrice, who, frankly, gave meaning to the phrase ‘girl power’ four centuries before the Spice Girls claimed they invented it. TG: She deals with the men on their terms. They are propelled by their sense of honour, so she agrees to play in that way. In that scene she says ‘if I were a man’, three times, ‘Oh God if I were a man, this is what I would do, and there is nobody round me who is prepared to be like a man because you’re all talk!’ She challenges him [Benedick] to kill Claudio because she wants to see if he is prepared to be a grown-up, and not just be someone who does the talk and is not prepared to do the walk. You know, I don’t agree with honour killings personally [laughs] and I don’t know if Beatrice would want to see that happen, but I think she wants to see whether someone is truly going to stand up for what is unjust, and stand up against it, or whether they are just going to continue with the pretence. Have you ever asked anyone to fight for you? TG: I’ve never asked anybody to kill someone on my behalf, no. No I haven’t, I haven’t done that. [pauses, contemplating] I’ve tended to fight my own corner, you may be surprised to hear. I think I would encourage people to stand against injustice and speak the truth. Whether you put it into practice or not is another matter. **** Don’t ask me why, but we got talking about cutlery. It’s actually quite profound, when you think about it: TG: Someone who was working at the theatre said ‘if you were a piece of cutlery, would you be a knife, a fork or a spoon?’ What did you say? TG: I said a spoon. Because you can get quite sharp edged spoons so you could use it as a knife, and shovel a lot at the same time, but also it’s a quite cosy shape. It’s a multifunctional cosy tool. You can really scoop out peanut butter with it. What would you be? I think that’s quite a deep question, I’d have to think about it. TG: But that’s the thing, you have to say immediately. Well I first thought a fork, but I don’t know why. TG: I immediately said spoon and thought about it later. It’s a good question though isn’t it?! |