Claudie Blakley: Actress swaps gentle costume drama for Shakespeare’s dark tale of betrayal

WHEN it comes to female stage roles they don’t come much bigger than Lady Macbeth.

Shakespeare’s portrait of searing ambition is up there with Lady Bracknell, the unflinching battleship in The Importance of Being Earnest or Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and four centuries after The Bard first created arguably his greatest female character, she remains one of the toughest challenges an actress can face.

Claudie Blakley is the latest to take on the role in a new production of Macbeth which opens at Sheffield’s Crucible theatre next month. The pared-down production, directed by Daniel Evans, also stars Geoffrey Streatfeild in the title role, and for Blakley, best known for playing Emma Timmins in the BBC’s hugely popular TV series Lark Rise to Candleford, it’s a chance to follow in the footsteps of such luminaries as Vivien Leigh and Dame Judi Dench.

“It is something of a departure from the roles I get normally, but ever since I first read the play I’ve been a bit obsessed with Lady Macbeth. I’ve always wanted to play her, so when this offer came out of the blue I jumped at it,” she says. “I don’t think it gets any more challenging than this. We always want to play somebody who is very different from ourselves. It was gorgeous playing Emma Timmins, but to get my teeth into something like this is really exciting.”

Blakley says she finds Shakespeare’s ruinous queen fascinating. “She’s a remarkably complex character and I still feel very much at the bottom of the mountain with a long way to go. It’s scary how her brain works and trying to get into the psyche of someone who will stop at nothing to get what she wants is a challenge.”

Although Lady Macbeth is cold and calculating, Blakley doesn’t believe she is inherently wicked.

“It would be very easy to portray her simply as evil, which I don’t believe she is. She has to call on evil spirits in order to adopt this cold, ruthless character and to carry her actions out. She doesn’t start out evil but her hunger for power takes her down that path.”

She is also the power behind the throne. “She instils her husband with the strength he needs to become king. It’s born out of raw ambition and greed and she gets swept along by that, but I think her actions are also born out of love.”

Blakley is no stranger to playing Shakespeare having performed with the RSC in the past and believes his work remains the litmus test for any serious actor.

“I think all actors need to get their teeth into Shakespeare, it’s like running the marathon because it really is the ultimate challenge.” Especially, she adds, for women. “Shakespeare gives women strong roles and you can see in the way he writes that he has great respect for women.”

Female actors have long complained that there aren’t enough challenging roles for women, something Blakley agrees with. “I don’t think there are enough good female roles and when you reach a certain age they really become few and far between. One of the reasons Shakespeare’s plays are still in such demand is because he writes such great parts for women, but he’s not the only one, I think Ibsen and Chekhov wrote brilliant roles for women and Pinter as well.”

Her father, Alan Blakley, was in 60s pop band The Tremeloes, while her mother was a keen amateur actress so it’s perhaps not surprising that she ended up in the world of entertainment.

“When I was younger me, my mum and my sister used to be in the pantomimes in the local amateur dramatic society and I was a dancer up until I was 18, so acting was always on our doorstep.”

She nearly became a singer like her sister but opted to go to drama school instead. Her first professional role was as Ophelia in a production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the National Theatre, not a bad start for a budding actress.

“To begin with I was predominantly doing theatre and when I look back I think that was a brilliant way in because I got to work with great people like Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench and I’m thankful because it really gave me such a good foundation.”

Her appearance alongside McKellen in The Seagull at West Yorkshire Playhouse earned her the Ian Charleson Award and she has fond memories of her time in Leeds. “I learned so much from him [McKellen], his inventiveness and how his brain is so alive with ideas, as well as his work ethic. During rehearsals I never saw him without a script in his hand because he said the script has all the clues and he’s right.”

As well as stage work, she has appeared in notable TV series such as Cranford and several films including Pride and Prejudice and Gosford Park, in which she lined up alongside some of the cream of British acting talent.

“There was Maggie Smith, Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon and Helen Mirren and I was absolutely terrified when I arrived on the first day because I was just in awe of these people. But after a while you don’t seem them as famous you just see them as fellow actors,” she says. “What’s so lovely about them is they’re all so twinkly. There’s no cynicism with them and they were a joy to work with.”

So, too, was the film’s director Robert Altman. “He was amazing, he got everyone to throw their ideas into the pot and he was very collaborative. A lot of that film was improvised and he would say ‘don’t worry about the lines’, he would allow the scene to play itself almost, it felt like a play in many ways.”

Then in 2007, she landed a role in the BBC’s gentle costume drama Lark Rise to Candleford which proved a huge hit with TV audiences.

“We wanted to create characters that lived in this earthy, real world but we had no idea how attached people would get to them. People still stop me in the street saying, ‘please tell me there’s going to be another series?’ And I have to tell them that unfortunately there won’t be.

“It was like a cosy jumper and a hot chocolate that allowed you to switch off for an hour and get drawn into this fanciful little world, which is lovely. It was quite humbling because it felt like people needed something like that in their lives,” she says. “I never tired of playing that part and being in the company of that cast, but as with all these things you get to the point where you’ve exhausted every storyline and it’s a good thing to leave people wanting more rather than going on too long.”

Despite making a name for herself in costume dramas like this, Blakley has enjoyed shaking off this staid image recently. “I’ve just finished doing Comedy of Errors with Lenny Henry which was brilliant, I was able to reinvent myself a bit because it was a modern version and I got to wear a tight red dress and play a sexy role. It was great because all I seemed to be playing recently was spinsters and I’m like ‘hello, I can do other roles’,” she says, laughing.

“But that’s one of the hardest things about this business you have to keep breaking the mould otherwise people start to think you can only play certain roles. But at the same time people see me as a character actor and that’s cool with me.”

Which brings us back to Macbeth. For Blakley it means a return to the Crucible where she last appeared seven years ago in a production of Edward Bond’s Lear. “I love the Crucible, it’s such a gorgeous space to perform and it’s great to be back here.” She’s also reunited with actor-turned-director Daniel Evans. “He was Peter Pan to my Wendy years ago at the National and now he’s my director which is fantastic because he’s great to work with.”

And she’s back playing one of the most intriguing stage characters ever created. “She’s a strong woman who wields power but she does so in a man’s world and that’s one of the reasons that people are still fascinated by her. She’s full of all these contradictions and this is what makes her so interesting. For me it’s a dream job. It just doesn’t get any better than this.”

Macbeth runs at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, from September 5 to October 6. For tickets call 0114 249 6000 or visit www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk

A portrait 
of ambition

Lady Macbeth is the wife of the play’s protagonist, Macbeth, and becomes Queen of Scotland after goading him into committing murder.

It is believed that John Rice, a boy actor with the King’s Men, may have played Lady Macbeth in a performance at the Globe Theatre in 1611.

By the mid-18th century, Lady Macbeth was portrayed as an increasingly complex character by female actors.

During the past century, the role has attracted countless notable actresses over the years. Jeanette Nolan performed the role in Orson Welles’s 1948 film adaptation, while Vivien Leigh, Glenda Jackson, Francesca Annis, Judi Dench and, more recently, Keeley Hawes, have all taken on the role.