Actor Maxine Peake: ‘People are looking for an alternative universe — a mystery’

It’s not surprising to hear Maxine Peake admit that she’s “a bit of a folk-horror fan”. The last time I saw her was in a spectral reading of Kay Dick’s novella They in Manchester, where she materialised at 10pm, drifting through the audience while her face flickered between startled states as she narrated the persecution and silencing of artists in a dystopian society. There was no curtain-call bow; once she reached the end of the traverse stage, she simply cast a final inscrutable look over her shoulder, then vanished.

Now she is rehearsing a theatre adaptation of John Bowen’s similarly unsettling 1970 BBC Play for Today, Robin Redbreast, which opens at Manchester’s Aviva Studios next week. It shares horror-inflected genetics with They. Bowen’s heroine, Norah, moves from London to the countryside after a break-up, where she’s ensnared by a pagan community with designs on her body.

Peake discovered the film five years ago, she says when we meet in west London’s Riverside Studios early one morning. While developing the show, “We thought, ‘Will it still be current?’ And sometimes when you’ve had something for so long, you can lose interest, you sort of move on, but in some ways — especially what’s happening with Roe vs Wade — it just felt more current.”

Her recent work has portrayed women railing against establishments that are invariably male. In 2022, she played the first, and so far only, female Speaker of the House of Commons, Betty Boothroyd, in Betty! A Sort of Musical, which Peake also co-wrote. She was like a Catherine wheel onstage, fizzing with eccentricity in a show that barrelled giddily through the politician’s career. But her effervescence also gave way to bite as she upbraided ministers.

It came months after Peake showed similar grit in her most poignant role so far, as Anne Williams in ITV’s Anne, about the real-life Hillsborough stadium disaster when 97 footballs fans were crushed to death, including Williams’s son. She appeared both indefatigable and totally at sea, in one scene minute against the vastness of the football stadium — a visual metaphor for Williams’s fight for justice.

For Peake, these performances have been “about women who were trying to make themselves seen”, she says, “who were trying to make themselves visible and trying to make themselves heard . . . It was always about women with a passion, with a political drive.” Norah’s fate illustrates “women’s experiences when they speak out — what the consequences of that are”.

“That’s the whole of history,” says Peake. She points to charges of witchcraft showing how, historically, “women have been treated with suspicion or been punished if they are single”. “I think we’re still in a society where there’s a lot of suspicion and a lot of judgment. But we have come through a history of some horrendous treatment of women who didn’t toe the line or didn’t enter into sort of conventional society.” Peake’s piercing, concentrated look freezes in the middle distance.

The same look appears as she explains how witchcraft and folk horror continue to haunt our collective imagination. “It feels like it’s going through a resurgence,” she says. “It’s dark days for a lot of people. And especially, more than ever, [with] the environmental issues, I think people are looking for a slightly alternative universe — a mystery.”

That was part of the “magic” of Bolton in Greater Manchester where Peake, now 49, grew up against “the shadow of the west Pennines”. “Everyone was called hippie Pete and hippie Darren,” she says in one of her occasional flippant sidebars. “You’d go back to the flats and they all had striped jumpers on and long hair, and we’d all go and watch Star Trek . . . It was quite geeky in a way, but I sort of loved that world . . . It was just escapism, I think.”

Bolton couldn’t keep Peake for ever. After several knock-backs in her early attempts to become an actor, she won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Her first major role afterwards was in Victoria Wood’s 1990s sitcom Dinnerladies, and she went on to play a barrister in the BBC’s drama series Silk, a lauded Hamlet in 2014, Blanche DuBois in a 2016 production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Since then, she has seldom been off the UK’s television screens, and this highly prolific career has included a mass of theatre work and more than a dozen films, including Mike Leigh’s Peterloo; she is next set to play the American-Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was assassinated in 2006. Her own writing has included plays about the cyclist Beryl Burton and trawler campaigner Lillian Bilocca.

Peake’s escapist streak has bled through into a playfulness and risk-taking in her theatre work. “I’ve done some very commercial work in my time, but I think with Sarah [Frankcom, director] and Imogen [Knight, movement director], we err towards a more alternative [style] anyway,” she says. “I think that’s our taste. I think once an indie kid, always an indie kid. You always go for stuff that’s a little bit more left-field or a little less conventional.”

In 2023, Peake formed the production company MAAT (Music, Art, Activism, Theatre) with Frankcom and Knight. “Looking through that lens of female and female-identifying stories, it’s shifting, it’s better, but we weren’t feeling that the stories we wanted to tell were getting commissioned,” she says. “So we thought: ‘How do you rectify that?’” They enjoy unexpected storytelling: “Having a framework and then pulling it, dragging it from its roots and reshuffling it and planting it back again . . . I think we always push ourselves. We don’t want to do anything that’s comfortable.”

But she recognises this creative freedom is endangered by straitened funding. “People want sure-fire hits,” she says. “They want to know that they’re going to make money . . . There aren’t many places that can take risks — they can’t afford to . . . Where do those people go who don’t particularly want mainstream theatre?” Judging by her recent career: wherever Peake is performing.

‘Robin/Red/Breast’ runs May 15-26 at Aviva Studios, factoryinternational.org