Ruth’s busy mending fences in a story of feuding farming folk
Ruth WILSON loved getting down to some hard graft on a Yorkshire farm to prepare for a film role — shearing sheep and mending fences — but she admits she was just as thrilled to get back to her creature comforts.
‘hot showers . . . and cappuccino!’ she told me, after explaining how she bonded with the land for director Clio Barnard’s movie Dark River (which opens here next week).
Wilson plays Alice, who returns after several years to the family’s homestead following the death of her father (played in flashback by Sean Bean).
her brother Joe (Mark Stanley), has let the place run down; and the siblings are soon at war, after Alice announces she intends to take over the tenancy. She feels she’s owed it, after the sexual abuse her father inflicted on her.
Wilson’s on top form, giving a raw, wounded performance as a woman who cannot bear to be touched.
Early on, she’s alone on screen and — as she steels herself to re-enter the house — her face and body language paint a vivid picture of her psychological torment.
‘When we were making it, we talked a lot about the shame of abuse; and how it breeds silence. And that inability [to speak] breeds more shame,’ Wilson observed when we met for coffee (her) and tea (me) in London.
the film explores the feeling many victims have: they are somehow partly responsible. ‘And that’s what keeps them silent,’ Wilson said.
For me, the film worked on several levels: the brother believing his sister has no right to the land she was raised on. And the fact that working the land is no holiday.
Wilson recalled how she and Barnard discussed how we’ve ‘put the land on a pedestal’.
‘What the patriarchy has done to the female body, well the same thing has been done to the countryside. We made it look beautiful, yet underneath, it’s brutal and violent. We’ve been objectifying the land the same way we’ve been objectifying women. that’s the thesis Clio was testing.’
Every man Alice meets, in the UK at least, puts her down and patronises her, when it’s abundantly clear she has more experience with animals and farming than they do.
A topic for the times, I suggested. ‘I think it’s a really interesting time,’ Wilson agreed. ‘ Quite a delicate time, as well. Our industry has sold sex. And we, as women, are the ones being sold.
‘We sell a lifestyle that doesn’t really exist, for commercial reasons. We’ve become commodities. So sometimes I think that image of us, on the red carpet, and being lined up against other women in magazines, the “competition” that becomes, doesn’t do us justice.
‘Men don’t get objectified in the same way! they just walk the red carpet and are respected for being artists. Whereas we (women) have another job to do, which is to sell products. And so I think we might be undervalued for that reason.
‘It’s not about your work — which is depressing. It’s about your beauty; or if you’ve got the best outfit on.
‘Everyone’s complicit in it,’ she added. ‘I find it a constant fight in myself. I think a lot of actresses do.’
SHE’S been reading Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room Of One’s Own. ‘She [Woolf] was feeling shut out over the need for men to feel naturally superior to women,’ she said.
It’s all very messy — but Wilson believes that’s OK. ‘It’s a major discussion going on between women and men; and it requires deep thought. there will be trauma, a lot of pain and revelation.’
there will be revelations closer to home, when Wilson portrays her own grandmother in a three-part BBC1 drama, filming with director Richard Laxton in April, with the working title Mrs Wilson.
‘It’s about granny and grandfather. When he died, she found out she wasn’t the only wife. there were
four of them altogether.’ there are also rumours that she has returned to playing the fascinating Alice Morgan in a new four-part series of Luther, with Idris Elba.
She gives me a look that suggests I might end up getting sheared like a sheep if I don’t shut up. then she smiles, and leaves.