AN ANNE BOLEYN FOR ALL SEASONS
British actress Lydia Leonard is a fresh new talent as Anne Boleyn in the Broadway play.
NEW YORK — In the first hour of the Tudor stage epic “Wolf Hall,” Anne Boleyn makes exactly one appearance. “Don’t you know who I am?” she snarks to the court of Henry VIII, then quickly disappears.
It’s a question audiences may soon be asking too. The actress who utters the line is an unknown 33-year-old Isle of Wight native named Lydia Leonard — a presence so new to the U.S. theater scene that until a few weeks ago she had never even seen a Broadway show, much less starred in one.
Yet on a stage that’s swaggering with masculinity, Leonard distinguishes herself in several ways. Starring in a production that shares a name and story line with — if not the deadly serious spirit of — the concurrent PBS broadcast, Leonard blows in like a fresh gale, playing the ill-fated queen with equal parts manipulation and liberation.
“I didn’t really know of Lydia before I cast her. I think I’d seen her in one small thing, as an Eastern European,” said “Wolf Hall’s” director, Jeremy Herrin, an Olivier-nominated British theater veteran. “But I was quickly struck by her. She had this mix of cold intellectuality and a strong emotional sense you don’t often find in the same actor.”
Leonard’s success underscores theater’s ability to mint new stars from seemingly out of nowhere, even as her decidedly modern style of gregariousness reminds that portentous period actors on stage can be very different off it.
As she walked through midtown Manhattan’s theater district on a recent weekday, the diminutive Leonard proved a sparkplug presence, as taken with the swirl around her as many of the tourists who unknowingly passed her by. She was on her way to work after an actor’s happy hour dinner (Sardi’s, because it seemed the kind of prototypically Broadway-ish place she’d read about in England).
Leonard speaks quickly and conversationally, a contrast to the Machiavellian pronouncements of her character. She noted the friends razzing her on Facebook for all the morally slippery adjectives critics bestowed on her character, cited the problems a carb-based meal presented to a corset-based costume and pondered whether her chosen castmate gift (bandannas) was on par with other gifts (customized T-shirts, roses).
She spotted a billboard. “Oh, there I am,” she said, with a mix of satisfaction and surprise as she gestured to a “Wolf Hall” image. On it, a frocked, steely-eyed Anne dominates the foreground while Nathaniel Parker’s Henry and Ben Miles’ lead character, Thomas Cromwell, hover behind. “Well, that’s a little embarrassing,” she said. “Why am I taking up so much more space than Ben and Nat?”
This was a comparatively easy day for the “Wolf Hall” actress — only a single two-hour, 45-minute show, compared with the 51⁄2-hour, two-part marathons of other days, including the opening 24 hours earlier.
Indeed, “Wolf Hall” has become a phenomenon as multifarious as Henry VIII’s matrimonial activities. Hilary Mantel’s 2009 historical novel of the same name — about how the humbly rooted Cromwell plotted his way to behind-the-throne power, with Boleyn as ally and antagonist — won the Man Booker Prize, spawned a sequel (“Bring Up the Bodies”), a planned third book this year (“The Mirror and the Light),” a BBC miniseries based on both books (currently airing on PBS) and a two-part Royal Shakespeare Company staging.
After a pair of go-rounds in England, the Royal Shakespeare Company production, with most of the cast intact, opened at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre 10 days ago to sparkling reviews. On Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays, the two parts are performed consecutively, with just several hours of break in between. (Thursday is reserved just for the first part and Friday the second; both performances are in the evening.)
But what could have been a formal stunt turns into more than the sum of its parts, a live-theater spin on binge-watching. “We’re part of an offering that pushes back at how tiny our goblets of culture are becoming,” Herrin said.
Because Boleyn is as much a factor offstage — players frequently worry about what she will or won’t do — as on it, Leonard has some breaks between showstoppers. Still, she commands the room much of the time she’s in it. Leonard’s character makes dramatic pronouncements such as “those who are made can be unmade” yet tempers her brassiness with vulnerability.
“Anne is strong and bold and often vicious, but I wanted to investigate her appeal to Henry — not to fall into the trap of making her likable, because that’s irrelevant and not interesting — but to keep it fun and see how clever and bright she is,” she said.
Leonard’s career began in earnest in drama school, and she has often starred in period pieces in England, largely on the stage (e.g., a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “Hecuba”), though she did have a small role in the Bill Condon-directed WikiLeaks movie “The Fifth Estate.”
Herrin believes Leonard’s success comes from her willingness to hold her own in a male-dominated world, both in the show and beyond. “There’s something about her that’s very comfortable with men — something dynamic and tough and a little tomboyish and competitive,” he said. “She fights for things; there’s nothing demure or coquettish or backfoot about her.”
Costar Miles chuckled when asked about the actress’ demeanor. “She says exactly what she thinks. Always in the nicest way. But she is always ready with a comeback.” (Miles, who spends nearly the entire 51⁄2 hours on stage, is best known for the British sitcom “Coupling.”)
Shortly before curtain, Leonard moved quickly around her dressing room — it’s a small space, pinned with theater quotes and cards from friends — as a crew member helped her into a corset. “The play makes a lot of references to Anne as flatchested but this thing has a tendency to push them up,” she said, laughing and motioning to herself, then headed down to the wardrobe area. Nearly a dozen dresses hang there — she has a costume change after almost every scene, many of the outfits so heavy they caused back pain earlier in the production. The pièce de résistance is the crown, placed with ceremony on her head during a coronation scene.
“It’s really not quite big enough,” she said shortly before putting it on, playfully sliding the bejeweled accessory one way in a hip-hop pose and another to look like a court jester. “But I guess they really liked it. I’m always worried it will fall off while I’m walking. I don’t know what I’d do if that happened.” She paused. “I am Anne. I guess I probably would make someone else pick it up.”