Playing Viola in Twelfth Night at the National, just 18 months after leaving drama school, is demanding. But it must be some help, I suggest to Tamara Lawrance, that she has already played the role at Rada? “I did!” she acknowledges, then adds with what looks like dismay: “How did you know that?” Because it is listed on your CV on the National’s website. “Oh, for f-f-f-flip’s sake! Look, it was a really weird version.”
Lawrance’s second year as a student included an experiment, Exploded Shakespeare, requiring the creation of a 90-minute version of one of the plays, using a text half Shakespeare, 25% devised, with the final quarter taken from songs and plays by other writers. Lawrance’s Viola incorporated speeches from Manfred Karge’s play Man to Man and the song The Twelfth of Never. “In theory, it should have been great,” she says. “But it was a bit much. It was actually the worst feedback I ever got with any character I ever played in all my training. So it’s good I’ve been given another shot.”
For Lawrance’s second Twelfth Night, director Simon Godwin has exploded the conventional casting. Malvolio, the ridiculed steward, becomes Malvolia, played by Tamsin Greig. Malvolia is still tricked into thinking that she is loved by Olivia, which means, presumably, that this staging has a lesbian subtext? “Yes. Absolutely. And it’s a very gender-bendery production all round,” Lawrance laughs. Rehearsals have explored whether, when Olivia suffers romantic pangs for Cesario (actually Viola in male disguise), she may know there’s a woman underneath the clothes.
While Viola is impersonating Cesario, she is simultaneously posing as her twin brother, Sebastian. Some productions ask the audience simply to accept as a theatrical conceit the idea that the twins are mirror images, but this one is aiming to make Lawrance and co-star Daniel Ezra genuine lookalikes. “We’re using matching bits of costume, doing something with the hair,” she says. “We’re aiming for a similar silhouette, and some shared mannerisms. And I’m probably going to have platform trainers because Daniel’s a bit taller than me.”
Lawrance showed early versatility by portraying, as a six-year-old at school, a fish who wants more colourful scales. “I remember standing on stage and not paying attention to the play because I was so thrilled to have an audience. Just standing there, thinking, ‘This is so cool.’ Which obviously is really bad acting, but it started me off.”
She was dismayed to find that her secondary school didn’t offer theatre as an option until year 10, so she cajoled the drama teacher into setting up a club for younger students. At the Shakespeare Schools festival, she played half of Puck (shared with another girl) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the title role in Macbeth. Having a black schoolgirl from Wembley play a Scottish king was a precocious piece of colour- and gender-blind casting.
Lawrance’s family – her mother a hospital clinical technician, her father a delivery driver – were “scared about the insecurity of acting” but there was much encouragement from elsewhere: “At school, the head of drama, even as I was miserably failing my A-levels, was helping me to find audition pieces for Rada.”
Remarkably, her first year after leaving drama school, in the summer of 2015, was divided between appearing at the National in a revival of August Wilson’s modern classic, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, playing the groupie of a blues legend, and appearing in the BBC crime drama Undercover, as the daughter of Adrian Lester and Sophie Okonedo.
“I was really scared,” she says. “I’d re-watched Hotel Rwanda and was just crying in my room at what Sophie could do. And I’d grown up watching Adrian Lester in Hustle and saw him on stage in Red Velvet. And then there they were in front of me. It was crazy. But it was a beautiful first job because the children didn’t have to carry the story, yet we still had cool roles. Sophie taught me about focus. If she heard me talking on set about something else, she’d be, ‘Don’t talk about that! Think about the scene!’ And that’s why she is where she is. I want to be like that. Hey, one day!”
Between Ma Rainey and Twelfth Night, Lawrance appeared at London’s Royal Court in Unreachable, a play created in rehearsal by the cast with writer-director Anthony Neilson. “Man!” she says. “We got the final scene on the day of the first preview. And then it changed at every preview for the first five nights. We started without ever having run the whole thing right through. We were as surprised as the audience by bits of it.”
In that movie-business satire, Lawrance played Natasha, a star prone to expressing herself with reckless candour. Was the character based on nightmare actors she had worked with or fears of what fame might one day do to her? “I was channelling an element of myself. I can be quite direct, dry and frank. There’s a version of me that is pretty down-the-line. It’s not intentionally rude, but it can be perceived as rudeness.”
Her career so far has included two roles in which the race of the character was relevant – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Undercover – and two, in Twelfth Night and Unreachable, where it wasn’t.
“The ideal,” says Lawrance, “would be to go on doing both. I do think it’s beautiful that Viola and Sebastian get to be played by black people and it’s not a big thing, we’re just actors. But I don’t want the audience always to be ‘colour-blind’, in terms of not noticing or ignoring it. See that I’m black. I love being black. Doing work that is race-specific opens me up to areas of myself and my history. So, as it goes on, I’d like to play both.”
- Twelfth Night is at the National Theatre, London, from 15 February. There is an NT Live broadcast on 6 April.
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