The Big Interview: Siobhan Redmond
photo source: Yorkshire Post
Even a short time spent with
Siobhan Redmond makes you feel that
she’d be a very good person to be with if you got lost in the jungle.
She’d somehow manage to keep you laughing as you both
grappled with snakes, slapped the bugs out of your hair and pulled
leeches off your ankles. Put simply, she’s terrific company, and seems
to see the funny side of every situation.
A vastly versatile
actress of 30 years experience across everything from regular
appearances with the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre of
Scotland to long-running roles in
The Bill,
Holby City,
Taggart and as ball-breaking cop Mo Connell in
Between the Lines, she says she’s the “pest in the room” at rehearsals who relentlessly asks questions.
“I
often wonder where the talking is coming from, then suddenly realise
it’s me,” she says, her delivery somewhere between a giggle and a groan.
Barely pausing for breath, she goes on: “I like to try and be as clear
as possible about what we’re heading towards.
“I never suffer in
silence – although some colleagues maybe wish I would. I realise my
manners are not what they should be and I should sometimes shut up.”
Despite
being so chatty and inquisitive, she says it’s really when the talking
about how to do the job stops and the actual doing of it begins that she
feels truly at home. Recent times have seen her as Eleanor of Aquitaine
in
King John and Lady Macbeth in
Dunsinane with the RSC. Now she’s in Leeds, rehearsing her part as Mephistopheles to Kevin Trainor’s Faustus in
Dr Faustus, directed by Dominic Hill.
It’s
a co-production between West Yorkshire Playhouse and Glasgow Citizens’
Theatre, and the contemporary setting comprises three acts of the
400-year-old classical text by Christopher Marlowe plus two specially
commissioned acts (three and four) by Irish writer Colin Teevan. The
production promises lots of smoke and mirrors, with stage illusions
created by magic consultant James Freedman.
Faustus is positioned
as a modern day conjurer, whose hunger for notoriety is satisfied at a
price when he makes a pact with the Devil (in the guise of
Mephistopheles) in order to learn the black arts that will secure his
celebrity among the rich and powerful.
“There’s always been
argument over whether Marlowe actually did write acts three and four and
some evidence that he didn’t, “ says Redmond. “Colin’s writing has
brought something new and spellbinding to the piece, casting a different
light and contrasting high tragedy with low comedy.”
As for the
controversial casting of a woman as Mephistopheles – thought to be a
first in this country: “People are entitled to their opinions, and it
may upset a some who have a certain idea about the classical play.
Faustus was orphaned and brought up by foster parents. He then became an
academic, and has never known about women, so making Mephistopheles a
woman makes sense. Anyway, in the end he sells his soul for a pig in a
poke.
“(Some people) may hate it, but I hope most will come with
an open mind. For me, those creatures who are not quite of this world
like Mephistopheles are very exciting to play. You need to make them
recognisable, yet you also have to believe that they’re from a different
place.
“In this version Mephistopheles tells a story, and she is
at times mother, sister, lover. She’s Arthur and Martha, she comes in
different shapes and forms – and the price I have to pay for all this
intense variety is that I get to wear a series of costumes that make me
acutely physically uncomfortable.
“But it’s a small price. I’m the luckiest person in the world because I get to dress up every day and play.”
Read more at
Yorkshire Post
Doctor Faustus, West Yorkshire Playhouse until 16 March; Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 5–27 April. www.citz.co.uk
Siobhan Redmond plays devil's advocate with Doctor Faustus
Herald Scotland
interview
The lady’s for burning
You'd never confuse her with Clara Bow or Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, but
this afternoon
Siobhan Redmond can only be described as an It Girl.
She’s telling me about the part she’s playing in
Doctor Faustus,
Christopher Marlowe’s soul-selling tragedy, and she just can’t settle
on a gender. “I get to be both Arthur and Martha, which is delightful,”
she says. Delightful but hard to pin down.
Breaking with convention, director Dominic Hill has cast the Glasgow-born star of
Between The Lines and
Holby City
as Mephistopheles, the fallen angel tasked with luring the scholarly
Doctor Faustus off the straight and narrow. It’s a part normally played
by a man and, as she gets to grips with the role, Redmond isn’t able to
say whether she’s a boy or whether he’s a girl or – more likely –
whether it’s a matter of “yes to all of the above”.
“Demons are
not gender specific,” she says at the end of a day’s rehearsal in
Glasgow. “But they’re generally known as a boy and, yes, I’m generally
known as a girl. That was one of the things that intrigued me. I had
been thinking of Mephistopheles as ‘him’ but he ruthlessly exploits his
femininity, so I’ve arrived at ‘it’ by default, just to remind myself
that it isn’t human and you can’t expect it to conform to a set of
gender stereotypes.”
So “it” it is – although she drifts in and
out of “he”, “she” and “they” during our conversation. And that’s an
ambiguity that suits this charismatic actor just fine. Having played the
garrulous Barbs Marshall in Liz Lochhead’s
Perfect Days, the manipulative Elizabeth I in Schiller’s
Mary Stuart and the obstinate Gruach, aka Lady Macbeth, in David Greig’s
Dunsinane
(back for another Scottish outing later this year), she is more than up
for the challenge of throwing an extra layer of mystique over one of
the great roles of English-language theatre.
“The demon would come
to you in a way that you would find most palatable,” says Redmond, who
studied English language and literature at the University of St Andrews.
“This demon doesn’t quite give you what you want, but close enough for
you to find it interesting enough to become engaged with.” In the case
of the orphaned Faustus, the vision of Mephistopheles as a potential
mother figure could be very alluring indeed.
Breaking with
convention one step further, this co-production between Glasgow’s
Citizens and the West Yorkshire Playhouse is not exclusively the work of
Marlowe. Acts one, two and five are as he wrote them in 1592, but three
and four are modern-day rewrites. There are stylistic inconsistencies
that suggest Marlowe may never have written those two acts in the first
place and, as they are also full of satirical references long past their
sell-by date, Hill felt justified to bring in playwright Colin Teevan
as a 21st-century collaborator.
Read more at
The Scotsman
My Day on a Plate: Siobhan Redmond, actress
A short, food-related interview at
The Telegraph
