Tanya Moodie describes an actor as “an artist of intimacy”. It’s a nice description. Fiercely intelligent and fiercely emotional, she connects directly with her audiences – whether in August Wilson’s Fences, Lynn Nottage’s Intimate Apparel or, last summer, as Constance in King John. Simon Godwin, her director for the RSC’s new Hamlet, considers her “very adept with language … the work can be very raw and very felt. She’s willing to go to the frontier.”
Moodie, at 43, is young to play Hamlet’s mum – but then Paapa Essiedu is a notably young prince. Their stage relationship, Godwin says, is “electric, dazzling”. The characters share just one extended conversation: the anguished closet scene, tragically interrupted by eavesdropping Polonius. Mother and son are close, yet too rarely together. The RSC production was provoked by British-born Essiedu’s own sense of estrangement when he visited family in Ghana. It imagines that Hamlet has been educated abroad since childhood, so Gertrude has missed him growing up. “How much guilt does she feel about that?” Moodie asks. “So much guilt.”
Guilt, anger, fortitude: this is very much the Moodie toolkit. She’s rarely cast for frivolity, despite the gusto with which she laughs or tucks into a mid-rehearsal prawn sarnie. She has lived in the UK since her student days, but her Canadian accent emerges in the full surge of conversation.
For such a significant presence, Shakespeare gives Gertrude surprisingly few lines. “I didn’t even notice that, I had to be told,” Moodie says. “I was like, really? There’s an entire inner monologue going on, I never shut up – it didn’t even occur to me that I didn’t say very much.” In Moodie’s eyes, the queen’s tongue is still but her mind is racing. “What I lighted on is that Gertrude married very young, like 15. Everyone at that court has been to university – the staff, the king, my son, everyone – but she’s never had a formal education. I want to find out what caused those fissures that keep her from speaking. Dialogue comes out of tension. The steam comes up high in the pressure cooker and … boom!” She claps her hands. “The words come out. So it’s interesting if there’s a level of tension where she’s listening to everyone and having immense panic attacks, but smiling constantly because she’s the queen. That’s difficult. In my experience, with people I know, if they have to function at that level with all these fissures underneath, they self-medicate. When I added that element, the cogs started to have a bit of grease on them.”
“I get what’s going on in her brain. There’s no quiet there.” Moodie tautens her voice to a murmur. “Gertrude’s inner monologue is: ‘My son is not crazy. He’s just sad. We’ll do things that make him happy.’ And every time someone says he’s mad, Gertrude’s like [a look of stony panic]: ‘Did he just say mad? Please don’t say mad.’”
Being Gertrude sounds bloody exhausting. “I’m so glad that you say that!” Moodie exclaims. “Because I’d been wondering why, after rehearsal, I’m just cross-eyed with concentration.” She is used to accommodating emotionally fraught characters “on a psychophysical level”. “I made the mistake for years of thinking it had no effect on me, that I left it at work, but when I was married my ex-husband said: ‘No, you really change.’” Characters steeped in conflict burrow deep in her body. “I’ve had shingles five times in three years. The first time was when I did Fences. Easter Sunday 2013.” Shingles, a residue of chicken pox, can be triggered by emotional shock – “and every time I’ve had it I’ve been playing a character that has that shock. Every freaking time! Somehow I need to communicate to my psyche that it’s the character who is getting the shock, not me.”
“There will be actors reading this thinking, ‘Why doesn’t she just act it?’ The problem is that I happen to have grown into an incredibly suggestible person. If the director suggests an improvisation where I’m a wife whose husband has just died, that’s what I am. Period. There’s no thinking myself into it.” She laughs. “God. Imagine going out with me. You see why I’m single.”
Gertrude, as queen, is significant but relatively powerless. Not unlike most actors, I suggest, who can rarely steer their own destiny. “My next show is exactly about this,” Moodie says. She will collaborate with Laurence Boswell, who directed Intimate Apparel, on Trouble in Mind, a rarely performed 1955 play by the African American playwright Alice Childress in which a black company rehearses for a white director and management with their own ideas about “acting black”. “It’s so funny and so relevant,” Moodie says. Having selected the script, she will be fully involved in the production at Bath’s Ustinov theatre. “This is the first time I’ve consciously put myself in the position of being that proactive. I want to learn about the other processes.” She and writer Sarah Rutherford are also developing a film about the dark lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. “I just wanted to practise being proactive as opposed to reactive. I suppose my wings have been spreading.”
Those wings are also spreading into the political arena – Moodie has become an active member of the Women’s Equality Party. “I’ve been a feminist by nature and philosophy, and have been teaching my daughter feminist ideals, but I hadn’t actively joined anything,” Moodie says. “I told them that I’d always been too busy being black to be a feminist! But equality’s better for everyone, and I realised I just had to wake up.” The next frontier beckons.
- Hamlet is at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 13 August and live in cinemas on 8 June. Box office: 01789 403 493.
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