Hamlet? I’d rather play Richard III
Patsy Ferran’s performance in ‘Summer and Smoke’ has made the 28-year-old actress the talk of the town. Nick Curtis meets her
Theatre critics are currently head-over-heels in love with Patsy Ferran. Not exactly known for mistaking compliments for confetti, they swooned as one before a new production of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke at the Almeida Theatre earlier this month. “Unbearably good”, said The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish of Ferran’s performance as Alma, a southern preacher’s daughter infatuated with a neighbouring doctor. “Stunning,” said the woman from The Times. “One of Britain’s most exciting actors,” said another. Not for the first time, Ferran was compared to one of our greatest thespians, Maggie Smith.
“I have heard that once before,” says Ferran bashfully, “and it’s the biggest compliment anyone could pay me because I adore her. I’m usually compared to the cartoon squirrel with the nut from Ice Age.”
You may have seen the small, dark and animated Spanish-english actress as the wide-eyed maid Mercy in Sky One’s colonial drama Jamestown, or caught her short, sharp turn in last year’s film God’s Own Country. But it’s in the theatre where the 28-year-old has made the biggest impact, often in comic and/or naif roles (the squirrel comparison is not unapt). She upstaged Angela Lansbury and won a Critics’ Circle award in her stage debut as the dotty maid in Blithe Spirit in 2014, while she was still at Rada. She played Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island the same year and Celia in As You Like It at the National, and Portia in The Merchant of Venice for the RSC, all for director Polly Findlay.
More recently she single-handedly held Royal Court audiences spellbound playing the disaffected daughter of a healing cult-obsessed mother in the delightfully titled one-woman show My Mum’s a T--t. “I’m usually the quirky, funny one in the room,” Ferran says. “Not the beautiful blonde who gets the kind of male attention she doesn’t ask for.”
Nonetheless, Alma was a change of gear. “I have never had anything as complex and subtle,” says Ferran. “The other parts I’ve had have been brilliant, but the outlines have been thicker. Alma is so slippery and ephemeral, sometimes I feel I have not nailed her. She is so messy, a joy to sink my teeth into. She is close to my age, a young woman trying to figure life out, dealing with love and loneliness, not being allowed to be her own genuine self, and a lot of us can relate to that.”
Williams’s 1948 play is rarely staged, and Ferran says she was “prepared to find out on press night all the reasons why it doesn’t work, but wonderfully, that hasn’t happened”. Director Rebecca Frecknall’s stripped-down staging removes the hysteria and emotional overkill to which Williams often falls prey and allows the characters to breathe: Ferran’s physical and facial expressiveness makes her terribly vulnerable as Alma, almost skinless.
She suggests that her dexterous body language comes from a mixture of diffidence and inarticulacy: she was slow to speak as a child and quiet at school. “I am not very good at articulating myself in life, so I make up for it physically,” she says. “Although I’m mainly all elbows.” Actually, I’d say she is lucid and acute, but perhaps these feelings stem from growing up bilingual, with Spanish parents of very different temperaments. Her father, who works in private equity “and is the pensive, elegant, gentle energy in the house”, is from Barcelona, while her mother – “pure fire, heart, spirit” – is from Valencia. Although born in Spain, Ferran was raised in Weybridge and educated at the private Notre Dame school in Cobham.
“I am quite British, quite quiet and reserved. The word ‘apology’ doesn’t really exist in Spanish, and my family make fun of me because I apologise like no other, and say thank you and please,” she says.
There is steel to her, though: she realised she was funny aged 10, when she played a bee in a school revue, “and the entire theatre was in uproar. I thought, I know what my role in school is now, which is to occasionally make people laugh.”
And she decided she definitely wanted to act at 15, after her performance as Shylock in a Shakespeare Festival involving four schools was singled out for praise by the actor Paterson Joseph.
“From the age of 16, going to a rehearsal room and then on stage has felt very natural,” she says. She studied drama at Birmingham before going to Rada.
It sounds like her family is close and supportive, and her father’s job possibly provided a financial cushion. “If I am completely honest, ashamedly, I have to say I am very privileged,” she says cautiously. “I have grown up with opportunities handed to me. I am aware of it and I appreciate it, and I take those opportunities and work very, very hard.”
‘Being compared to Maggie Smith is the biggest compliment anyone could pay me’
What does she think of the oftrepeated charge that acting is becoming the preserve of the privileged, especially of posh boys?
“You sometimes do find yourself on sets with just a group of privileged people, a lot of young white men who have means,” she says. “That feels a bit icky, as if there’s something not right. But most of what I love about this job is that you cross paths with people you wouldn’t otherwise.”
We move on to gender, which in many ways seems to have supplanted class as the hot-button issue in the entertainment world. Ferran says that when she performed My Mum’s a T--t, she felt guilty that the audience were listening to only her for 80 minutes. Eventually the director, Royal Court boss Vicky Featherstone, told her: “I can guarantee you no male actor would apologise for taking up room on that stage.”
Ferran says when she works with a male director there is “always that dynamic at the back of your head, even if it’s just one per cent, that there is a man who is my boss, and however tiny it is, you have to manage that relationship”.
She has never been sexually harassed but has often been subjected by male actors to the casual, jokey sexism that is harder to call out. “My way of dealing with it is basically pretending to gag,” she says, demonstrating. She has worked more often for female theatre directors than male ones – that may be mostly happenstance, although Findlay clearly sees her as a muse or artistic partner.
“If you look 30 or 40 years ago that just didn’t exist,” says Ferran. “We are in a wave where we are determined to have a voice and we need to be really loud and messy. The best directors of 2030 or 2040 will be a mix of male and female and it just won’t matter.”
When she played Jim Hawkins, one of the first notable instances in the current vogue in theatre for genderblind casting, the character’s gender wasn’t defined. Would she like to see more of that, or 50-50 quotas for acting roles?
“I would love that and I would like to play certain male roles,” she says. “Not Hamlet, it’s done too often, people must be bored of it. A Richard III, perhaps, something grotesque. There aren’t enough ugly, grotesque female roles.”
The second series of Jamestown ends this week, and Ferran can’t audition for anything else until she hears whether it will be picked up for a third. If it is, that will mean five months filming in Budapest, away from her boyfriend of three years, an actor she prefers not to name. She must be ambitious for roles, though, apart from Richard III.
“There is something about American plays that ticks the boxes for me,” she says. “They tend to be dark, serious things but they always make me laugh. And, if I had to be completely honest, the thing I would like to do one day would probably be a Chekhov. Even though I can do funny, nothing sits better in my body than something that is depressing.”