Nicola Walker: ‘You’ve got to do things that scare you’
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“I haven’t really done this sort of play before,” says Nicola Walker, cradling a cup of tea and gazing thoughtfully out of the open window. “I was quite scared of it when I read it. And you’ve got to do things that scare you, haven’t you? If you read a script and you think, ‘That looks really hard,’ it’s best to say, ‘Yes, thank you very much.’”
The play in question is The Corn Is Green, a semi-autobiographical 1938 drama by Welsh writer Emlyn Williams. Walker plays Miss Lily Moffat, a straight-talking, inspirational teacher who arrives in a small Welsh mining village at the turn of the 20th century. On posters for the National Theatre’s new revival, she blazes out of a sea of dark coats and caps, fixing the viewer with the sort of frank, fearless gaze that has made Walker one of our most brilliant and best-loved actors.
Walker has a rare gift for drawing you close to a character with the tiniest of gestures, particularly onscreen: DCI Cassie Stuart (Unforgotten), divorce lawyer Hannah Stern (The Split), MI5 analyst Ruth Evershed (Spooks), loudmouth farmer Gillian (Last Tango in Halifax). She’s made viewers fall in love with these serious, complex women. Moffat — who is both of those things — seems right up her street. So what was it about this character that gave her pause?
The clue is in the costume. Walker cut her teeth on new writing (at London’s Royal Court) and relishes the joy of creating something new. You rarely find her in a bonnet or corset.
“It felt to me when I was younger that the parts in period pieces for women were a bit sort of dull,” admits the actor, who was last onstage as a very different teacher in Mark Ravenhill’s The Cane. “And that’s the shock when you read this play. It’s just brilliant writing. You have this amazing, energetic woman who’s doing something completely on her own. She has a plan, she’s completely convinced it’s going to work and she never deviates from that path.”
Written in tribute to a teacher who changed his life, Williams’ play is steeped in the Wales of his childhood, peppered with Welsh language and, in Dominic Cooke’s production, laced with music from a male voice choir. (This, says Walker, has reduced the rehearsal room to tears.) But it also depicts a community blighted by poverty and inequality.
Moffat, a force of nature, is determined to change that. She arrives by bike (shocking), speaks her mind (even more so) and within moments of her arrival is setting up a school, driven by her belief that education is for all. It’s her radical idealism that is so refreshing, says Walker. This is a trailblazing woman who stares down the restrictions of class and gender.
“I’m absolutely falling in love with her, day by day. She’s found a way of having some agency — such a buzzword! — in her life in a time when women didn’t have very much. And she’s completely open about that. Within the first two minutes, she’s said [to another spinster]: ‘Why don’t you give up on looking for a husband and enjoy yourself, same as I do?’ Which seemed to me fabulous rules for living now, never mind in 1910.”
She laughs. Walker is tremendously good company: easy to talk to, self-deprecating and funny. What really appeals to her, she adds, is the teacher’s fallibility. Visionary as she may be, she has plenty of life lessons of her own to learn. For Walker, it’s always the flaws that make a character.
“You have to have a level of shouting at characters,” she says. “If there is a part of me that is saying, ‘I can’t believe you’ve done that, that’s clearly a terrible idea!’, that’s always a good sign.”
In a sense, Moffat is a precursor to some of those vivid, driven women Walker plays so well: the detectives, lawyers and teachers who find themselves battling with intractable systems and their own conflicting feelings. She jokes that she’s played so many detectives already — six and counting — that she could probably pass herself off at a crime scene: “I think I could give it a good go: I could throw around enough acronyms to make people think I know what I’m talking about.”
But what audiences warm to is the humanity with which Walker invests her characters: the unspoken feelings that flash across their faces; the doubts that suddenly surface; the subtle clues as to what is going on in their minds. That’s certainly the case with Hannah Stern, the high-end divorce lawyer in Abi Morgan’s The Split, which returns to TV this Monday.
Hannah is a legal hotshot with a sharp mind and an even sharper wardrobe — “those costumes are hard work: I never sit down” — yet she begins season three up to her neck in her own messy separation. For Walker, those contradictions are key. She loves the honesty with which Morgan catches the warring desires that can trip people up.
“Abi’s always said it’s a Trojan horse, The Split,” she says. “It’s a divorce show that’s actually about love: the beauty of love and the micro-compromises we make. That dance we do on a daily basis, whether it’s family or a lover.”
Born in east London, Walker studied at Cambridge (thanks, she says, to an inspirational teacher of her own). Here a stint in the famous Footlights set her career in motion. But she suggests that her interest in the rich complexity of human behaviour has much earlier origins. As a child, she loved to eavesdrop on the goings-on in her grandma’s East End kitchen. Hidden under the table, she and her brother would listen in as half a dozen women put the world to rights.
“We learnt so much. Sometimes if you kept quiet, they would carry on talking — very grown-up things about marriage and love and children. They were hard conversations in that room sometimes and just very true and honest: people being very rude and really trusting each other.
“So my experience is that, even when really terrible things happen, people don’t necessarily behave the way you think they will. All my early understanding of life was in my Nan’s kitchen.”
‘The Corn Is Green’, National Theatre, London, from April 9, nationaltheatre.org.uk; ‘The Split’, BBC1, from April 4, bbc.co.uk
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