Martina Laird: 'Women are used to compromising, but the cost is becoming too great'

Martina Laird has taken on seven Shakespeare roles in the past two years and is yet to give up on the playwright. She tells Bridget Minamore about diversity and why she connects with Shakespeare’s writing of women

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At the beginning of 2016, Martina Laird appeared in her first ever Shakespeare production – The Taming of the Shrew. She was reminded of this only recently when her Facebook timeline republished a post she had written at the time, which read: “I’m dying to do more Shakespeare!”

Speaking to Laird in the downstairs cafe at Shakespeare’s Globe, the actor has just begun rehearsal for All’s Well That Ends Well, her seventh Shakespeare role in the two years since.

“Facebook might be magic,” Laird laughs. “Since then, I’ve done nothing but Shakespeare. Wow, universe, you listen!”

The Taming of the Shrew review at Above the Arts, London – ‘playful gender-swapped Shakespeare’

The Taming of the Shrew at London’s Above the Arts was followed by Romeo and Juliet at the Globe, before the acclaimed all-female trilogy of Julius Caesar, The Tempest and Henry IV at the Donmar Warehouse. Her role in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Coriolanus (as a gender-swapped Brutus) finished only weeks before rehearsals began for All’s Well, but Laird brushes off the idea that she needed more of a break before her two new roles as the Countess and the Widow.

“I’m still at the stage of discovery. What’s interesting is the Countess is bound by the scriptures of her environment – her role and her status, whereas the widow has this kind of freedom. But it’s interesting turning that on its head and exploring it.”

It is also her first time in All’s Well, a more rarely performed Shakespeare play.

“One theory we’ve been given is that we receive a lot of our Shakespearean taste from the Victorians, and the Victorians did not approve of Helena,” Laird smiles. “She was a young woman saying ‘Well, what’s the point of virginity, let me go chase this man, I will get him to marry me, let me confront the king.’ The Victorians were not into her as an example of womanhood. And she is unique, unlike many Shakespearean heroines, though he does write strong women.”

Laird’s career both on stage and screen has been varied over the years. She has been a polygamous, south-London wife in the National’s The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder, and a recovering addict in a women’s prison in poet Kate Tempest’s play Hopelessly Devoted. However, it’s the explicitly strong women who stick out to her as highlights.

The first role she could “relax into”, she says, was in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl by Errol John, a writer who also grew up in Trinidad.

“I remember reading it as a child and thinking, ‘What’s the point of this?’ I was used to looking at Shakespeare and having to dissect the meaning and the language, and I thought: ‘They just talk like normal people, Trinidadians.’ It was so interesting to come to it again and go ‘Wow, it’s so clever how he captures exactly the people, and the period, and the situations.’ ”

The second play that stands out is Marcus Gardley’s The House That Will Not Stand, set in 19th-century New Orleans and staged at London’s Tricycle theatre in 2014. From the way she would tap a gold-topped cane, to her bitter monologues about how she refused to allow her daughters to marry white men to secure their futures, Laird’s role as Beatrice, matriarch and “free woman of colour”, was deeply memorable.

Laird herself is quick to describe her love for the text. “I don’t want to be reductive or obvious in any way, but I think of Marcus as a kind of black Tennessee Williams. In the sense that his work is…” she pauses, “So hot, and sweaty, and poetic, and such an appreciation of the female influence and the female dilemma. His characters suffer. He, like Tennessee Williams, is this god that visits this suffering of the characters he creates and through that we get a sense of the epicness of their humanity. I literally read the stage directions and thought: ‘I need to do this’.”

Training at Webber Douglas (which has since been absorbed into RADA), Laird has always had a love for theatre. Born to an English father and Caribbean mother in St Kitts, she was raised in Trinidad among a large family, but with a large gap between her and her siblings.

“I was really lucky growing up as an only child, even though I wasn’t an only child. My mother decided to send me to weekend classes in drama because I was quite shy. Fortunately at that exact time, serendipitously, two very important people in my life were coming back to Trinidad and starting to share their training. One was playwright Tony Hall, who now runs his own kind of philosophy of theatre approach, and one was Noble Douglas, who is one of our foremost choreographers and dancers. They combined to make Lilliput Children’s Theatre Company, so I was able to join that.”

At Lilliput, she was able to flex her early theatre skills. A highlight was a “Trinidadian version of Cinderella” she wrote at about eight years old. “It involved all the local cultures of Trinidad – so there was Indian dancing, drumming, African dancing. Also my Cinderella? Her foot was too big for the shoe.”

However, Laird is perhaps best-known for her five-year stint on the BBC’s Casualty, where she spent three of those years working alongside Kwame Kwei-Armah as his onscreen wife. Of Kwei-Armah, she has nothing but good things to say, and her excitement about his new role as the Young Vic’s artistic director is palpable. “It’s the best thing that could happen in London right now, and it’s timely, and he’s the right person to do it. It’s also the Young Vic, which is about London, and inclusion, and diversity.”

Diversity in the theatre world is clearly one of Laird’s passions. Benefiting from training in one of the last years that grants were given for drama school, she recalls training with “a high percentage” of working-class actors. Since then, she has taught at drama schools and says she does not see the same percentages.

Laird links the decreasing numbers of working-class actors with the growing barriers to the welfare state. “I will be completely frank with you: in those days, there was the dole, and you would sign on between jobs. It was very difficult, it wasn’t great, but at the same time it facilitated a generation of actors and working-class actors, who didn’t have a background of money, to contemplate being a part of the profession.”

Continues…

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Q&A: Martina Laird

What was your first non-theatre job? As a student I worked in retail in Canterbury. I also waitressed—I’m a terrible waitress.

What was your first professional theatre job? It was with Double Edge Theatre Company, doing a piece called Vibes from the Scribes, which was recognising the work and the legacy of the Last Poets.

What’s your next job? It’s not been committed to yet, [but] the thing I’ve got lined up, I hope, is by a new writer.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? Maybe I would have benefited from approaching [the industry] with a business discipline. Take control, be in charge, build a career.

Who or what was your biggest influence? The people I was lucky to be taught by in Trinidad, Tony Hall and Noble Douglas and many others.

What’s your best advice for auditions? Be familiar with your texts, and then go in and make it matter to you. Create a situation in your mind that makes you believe the text matters, and then enjoy being able to inhabit that situation.

If you hadn’t been an actor, what would you have been? My dad had his eyes on me being a translator for the UN because I studied French and Spanish at university. At school I did well in religious studies and there was a teacher I liked who drove a Mercedes. I thought: ‘I’m going to be an RE teacher, driving a Mercedes sports convertible.’

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals? So many — I have all the theatre ones. Even when I’m not in a theatre I refer to ‘the Scottish play’ rather than calling it by its name. I remember making someone go out of the dressing room door, spin around, spit, then come back in. With acting, so much feels out of your control that if something goes well you want to be able to control it. It’s a world of such unpredictability that everyone is looking for structure that’s going to make you feel safe.

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For black actors and theatremakers, the profession can also be difficult. “[When] I joined the ranks of people trying to get work in the 1990s, as an actress of colour, it was hard. But even at that time there was more black representation in the theatre world, and now the one [theatre company] still standing from when I first came is Talawa.”

However, while many might recognise the ways working class and black actors might be shut out of the theatre world, Laird is taking action. In December, she facilitated a day of talks at the National Theatre about black actresses. The talks and panels were titled Palimpsest, a nod to the ways the history of black women in British theatre does exist, but is merely hidden beneath the surface. At the event, the likes of Noma Dumezweni and Suzette Llewellyn spoke candidly about everything from vying for roles, to mental health in the industry, and Laird says the event was only the beginning.

Stephen Bourne: History shows us the hidden pioneers of black British theatre

“Women are used to compromising, but the cost is becoming too great. I want to continue to share stories. I love the talking space. As I said at the beginning of the talks section of Palimpsest, we are honouring the tradition by speaking together, by witnessing each other, by saying it, by naming it.”

When it comes to her own work, and her own name, Laird admits: “I’m still kind of fumbling my way and still kind of going with the flow, but more and more I hold on to the importance of how I want to see work done. What first motivated me was the craft, and it still does.”

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CV: Martina Laird

Born: St Kitts, 1971
Training: Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art
Landmark productions: Theatre: The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder, National Theatre (2007), The House That Will Not Stand, Tricycle Theatre, London (2014), Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, National Theatre (2012). TV: Casualty, BBC (2001-2006)
Awards: Screen Nation, Best TV Actress Award (2004), Michael Elliot Trust Award for original television performance
Agent: Gordon and French

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All’s Well That Ends Well is at London’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse from January 11–March 3