Patsy Ferran is now most celebrated for a theatrical coup. Stepping tremendously into the lead role in A Streetcar Named Desire days before opening at the Almeida in January this year, she became, alongside Paul Mescal, part of a production which broke ticket-sales records – and dismantled the traditional idea of a classic heroine. Her professional debut nine years earlier was equally striking. In March 2014 London’s Gielgud theatre was crammed with fans of 88-year-old Angela Lansbury, appearing in Blithe Spirit as Noël Coward’s gargoyle ghost hunter. Then the maid came on, swivelling in all directions, wildly loopy and alarming. Ferran made the tiny part a focus for the spookiness of the play. It was as if spirits had unwired her. Yet perhaps it was she who was doing the unwiring? She looked as if she was hoovering up the ectoplasm.
Such physical fluency is rare on the British stage, where actors are more likely to be distinguished by vocal elasticity. Ferran’s particular talents – she won the Critics’ Circle award for best actress this year for Streetcar and for best newcomer in 2015 – are also evident off stage. As we talk, her hands are winging away in their own conversation. She could have done this interview wordlessly. With her fingers.
We meet in the airy spaciousness of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire in Deptford, southeast London, where Ferran is rehearsing in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Directed by Richard Jones, and opening at the Old Vic in September, she plays Eliza Doolittle opposite Bertie Carvel as Professor Higgins, the man who teaches the flower girl to speak proper and passes her off as a duchess.
She is in several happy skins. She is in her chosen uniform: jeans, T-shirt, jumper, socks and trainers. To be worn with only slight variations; on this occasion, she is in red, white and blue. She is not a fan of frocks: asked to bring one for a Streetcar photo shoot, she panicked (“I’m a people pleaser – and I can’t fulfil your request”). She is also currently at her happiest point in a production: “I tolerate performance. I enjoy rehearsal.” She likes sitting around with the cast, “reading the story aloud and dissecting it. It’s not exactly saving lives, but that’s what gets me excited.”
Jones, the multi-award-winning theatre and opera director whose productions include Anna Nicole and The Hairy Ape, thinks Pygmalion needs “a good old overhaul”. He has moved the action from 1912 to 1938, arguing it is best set in a starchy era; it is also the year of a sensitive film version, adapted by Shaw, with Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard. Actually, the play seems to me ripe for revival. Shaw’s perception that “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him” might have been the inspiration for Keir Starmer’s recent statement about oracy – or for actress Rosie Stancliffe’s YouTube videos recasting Boris Johnson’s words in a Newcastle accent. Creakily, the country is waking up to what counts as class.
Shifts in language and accents are home territory for Ferran. Her parents are Spanish. Though brought up in England, she was born in Valencia, in 1989. Spanish was the first language she heard, but English was what she first spoke: each “feels different in my mouth”. She can’t remember what she sounded like as a child, though her sister gave her a complex by saying she started to speak more posh when she began going to the Rada youth group. Is the voice she uses to talk with me her usual voice? Maybe “a bit better than normal”. Rather marvellously, John Marquez, who plays Eliza’s father, the eloquent dustman, also has a Spanish father.
Performance begins visibly to stir when she thinks about Eliza’s voice: how when her elocution gets ironed out and she moves to “the upper-class rhetoric of not saying what she feels”, she loses vibrancy. As she lets drop a fluting phrase, her back stiffens and the shape of her mouth twists slightly. Dialect lessons were the first thing Ferran asked for when she took the part. She shudders wordlessly at the role’s lor-luv-a-duck perils. She had not yet seen the YouTube video of our future queen, Kate Middleton, singing daintily in a school production of My Fair Lady about wanting a room somewhere.
Ferran is so rapid and droll that her academic diligence comes as a surprise. “Every single report card from nursery onwards, since I was three or four, always said the same thing: ‘Patricia is a conscientious student. I’m trying to relax that as I get older: it becomes exhausting.”
At 14, at her convent school in Cobham, Surrey, she had – bizarre choice – to opt for either Latin or drama. She dropped drama, and was thinking vaguely of becoming a translator or interpreter when her friend Sheridan (good name for a theatrical awakener) said casually: “Miss Tinniswood is upset you aren’t doing drama.” The episode has been Hollywooded in her head, where she sees herself running down the corridor, accosting the headmaster, yelling that she has to change her options. It was meeker than that, but “My heart raced. It was the biggest lightbulb moment of my life.”
She had always performed. She loves to dance and took ballet exams until she was 18: “I passed because of expression; my technique was appalling.” She had weird schoolgirl casting – as Shylock and Fagin. An early comedy appearance when she was about 10 now strikes her as crucial. She and her friend Katia were drafted into a school variety show to liven up a duet between two girls dressed as a flower and a bee. In flung-together costumes of black and yellow, they moved slowly from side to side at the back of the stage, waving their arms languidly like can’t-be-bothered bees. The audience capsized with laughter.
Ferran so vibrates to her characters on stage that it is tempting to sentimentalise her as all instinct. Actually she is precise, analytical. She peels questions to pieces – “I have a two-part answer” – and then (what a shock at a time when no one on the radio responds exactly to what they are asked) – confronts the query head on. It occurs to me only now that her ability not just to listen but to hear is as important as her more obviously amazing mimetic gifts. As is an unusual combination of being self-aware without being self-absorbed. She regards herself quizzically, as if someone odd had just sauntered onto the stage alongside her: “When I’m not working, my brain disappears to another plane. I’m not quite present.” Cabeza en las nubes (head in the clouds), her father used to say to her.
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She read drama and theatre arts at Birmingham and went on to Rada, where her favourite courses were flamenco, period dancing and choir. Her professional rise has been quick and wonderfully varied. In September 2014, six months after her West End debut, she was at Plymouth in James Graham’s The Angry Brigade, playing an activist poet, in whom she suggested both obsession and elusiveness. She does not consider herself political, but Graham, “very present in rehearsals”, illuminated the political system through the character’s drive: “It wasn’t just educational,” Ferran says, “my empathy valve was broadened.” She opens up her hands like wings, or the pages of a book.
At the end of that year she was at the centre of a reimagined Treasure Island at the National. In Bryony Lavery’s adaptation the main character was not Jim but Jem: “Be you boy or be you girl?” “That be my business.” Light as a feather, with wit coming out of her elbow as well as her mouth, she seemed to tumble across the stage as if blown by wind. The movement made for a particular indeterminate quality: comedy and sadness were fused. She reminded me of an even smaller Charlie Chaplin, and it turns out that he is one of her heroes. As is Buster Keaton. “I don’t like pure comedy… where no stakes are involved.” She favours, as well as physical unpredictability, a touch of “the sinister”.
She appeared in Three Sisters at the Almeida, and as the child of a cult-mother at the Royal Court in My Mum’s a Twat. She was a very funny Celia in As You Like It at the National. And she was Portia at the RSC. She was always riveting, but the distinctive hand work was threatening to get, well, out of hand. “I used my hands as signposts, especially in Shakespeare. I thought if I didn’t use my arms, people wouldn’t understand what I was saying. I don’t want you to have to work too hard.” One director asked her to sit on her hands.
Rebecca Frecknall, a director who is firing up the theatre, has been crucial to Ferran. In 2018 she cast her in Summer and Smoke, a little-known Tennessee Williams play whose neurasthenic heroine has echoes of Streetcar’s Blanche. The brilliantly stripped-back production let Ferran fly, suggesting how far she could reach: the febrility which had hitherto been mostly comic now looked like tragedy.
And then there was A Streetcar Named Desire, one of the great theatrical adventures of the past decade. A week before the play was due to open, Lydia Wilson, cast by Frecknall as Blanche, withdrew because of injury. Frecknall approached Ferran: she had a day to think about it and four days of rehearsal. The feat of memory alone was staggering. The fact that she cancelled her honeymoon to take on the part added piquancy (she prefers to keep her husband’s name out of publicity, but they eventually made up for the cancellation with a visit to her extended family in Spain). Her performance was transcendent.
Younger than usual for Blanche, Ferran was far removed from the scented sashaying associated with the part. Asked for her acting heroes, the first names she comes up with are men: Ben Whishaw, Joaquin Phoenix. Then she adds Sally Hawkins and Laurie Metcalf. She admires gangle-limbed Donald O’Connor who sang “Make ’em laugh” in Singin’ in the Rain and, recently, Daniel Rigby in Accidental Death of an Anarchist. She grew up watching Friends on repeat and can instantly identify “a David Schwimmerism or a Matt LeBlancism: they were my comedy teachers. I aspire to be a masculine female actor. I respond to the lack of vanity in performance which men are allowed more frequently than women.” Her Blanche Dubois was a new blend of wit and snobbery, propelled by the velocity of her own words. Ferran also made you believe that Blanche – who had, after all, been a schoolteacher – might actually have read a book.
There was of course another aspect to Streetcar. Paul Mescal. In the muscling Brando part he was extremely good. He also worked hard, and Ferran, who hadn’t seen Normal People, was unaffected by his celebrity, which he left – along with stress and egotism – with the girl fans from all over the world who crowded the stage door. Thinking she had better catch up with his work, she went to see Aftersun, for which he received an Oscar nomination. She was bowled over, congratulated Mescal and moved on. Until suddenly, in mid-performance, she looked across the stage and had “an intrusive thought: oh my god, it’s Paul Mescal from Aftersun.” In front of 300 or so people, she had “a fangirl moment on stage”.
She is a natural researcher. Before Summer and Smoke she explored Mississippi with her father. There was no time “to think about background or upbringing or middle names” before going on as Blanche, only “just time to learn my lines in the right order”. She concluded that: “The research gives you confidence but it doesn’t make you a better actor.” In rehearsals for Pygmalion the cast have been talking about parallels for Higgins and Eliza – Frankenstein among them – and Ferran has started to do some academic reading. She realised after taking the part that she thought she knew the story because she had listened compulsively to My Fair Lady. Yet she had never got right to the end: “I stopped after two-thirds. When a story gets too tense, I suffer.” Now she is eager to work out what it is that Eliza and Higgins feel about each other: “even if their beliefs contradict what they feel”. She explains that she wants to “dig deep”; as she does so, her hands become little trowels.
My heart sank when I saw the play advertised on the Old Vic website with a warning about coercive control – though not as much as it did when I saw the RSC warning that Richard III contained scenes of violence. It rose on talking to Ferran, who is non-doctrinaire and brisk about Higgins and his “etiquette bootcamp”. Yes, he bullies – but “he does not just bully Eliza”. What’s more, if Shaw had made him nicer the drama would drain away. She is determined her Eliza will have “steel and weight”.
Looking ahead, who would she most like to play? She hesitates… “If I set my mind too much on one thing I miss others. The jobs I hadn’t thought much of I have ended up loving the most.” Still, she always feels very at ease in American drama: she’s a particular fan of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train and joyfully rattles out its opening ferocious dialogue. And “I would love to play Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? If I’m still acting in 20 or 30 years.”
It is hard to think she won’t be, and hard to believe it won’t be in theatre, though she likes to break off into film and telly occasionally, most recently in Living as Bill Nighy’s character’s daughter-in-law: not least because they “teach you not to be precious, not to worry about not being right. That’s good for me.” Still, performance is not the only passion. She became a fervent reader over lockdown and grabbing a book has become part of a morning routine: “get up, make bed, drink water, wash face, hair up, make coffee, sit down on couch – and read”. She is currently absorbed in Rattlebone, Maxine Clair’s novel about a young black girl coming of age in 1950s Kansas. Though fascinated by the intense engagement people have with television, her “brain deadens” after watching much fiction on the screen. Reading calms her: “I’m a bit of a duck: calm on the surface, paddling underneath.” She reminds me more of a hummingbird: precise, vivid, alighting on the main point, the work of the wings lost in a whirr.
Pygmalion is at the Old Vic, London, 6 September-28 October
