Lesley Sharp is one of the busiest, best and most recognisable of British actresses, with a career that spans Top Girls at the Royal Court, Bob and Rose on TV, and The Full Monty in the cinema. Next week she returns to the stage in the end of history… at the Royal Court.
How did you first get involved with the end of history…?
Its director, John Tiffany, and I have bumped into each other over the years at various things and I’ve always thought it would be great to work with him. Then, last year he came to the first night of another play I was doing at the Royal Court, called The Woods, when a fire alarm went off in the middle of the show. We were all evacuated and he bounced over and said: “Don’t let this throw you. It’s amazing!” So, that was a brilliant way to reconnect with him. Later – not at that point I hasten to add – he asked me if I wanted to read this play by Jack Thorne...
What attracted you to it?
Jack is a young man, but he writes thrillingly for women. Look at those phenomenal three-dimensional roles he wrote for Andrea Riseborough and Julie Walters in National Treasure on Channel 4. The same is true of this play. He wants to write about what interests him, but within that he’s also fascinated, regardless of gender, by all the characters he’s writing. That’s surprisingly rare. This play ticks every single box: it’s full of ideas, it’s a wonderful character for a woman of my age, all the other characters are interesting and it’s a play I’d pay money to see.
Can you tell me a bit about it?
It takes you through three decades, from 1997 to 2017, in the life of a family and you find out how their ideas change. It’s about the casual slights and hurts and the intense connections and love that run in a complicated, well-meaning family.
Is it political?
The political landscape is part and parcel of what’s going on, because the mother and father are a couple whose relationship with politics began in the 1980s with their response to Margaret Thatcher. Their politics are to do with being aware of the world that’s directly in front of you. It’s the opposite of now, when everybody is obsessed with global politics and the big issues. With Brexit, for example, people can talk about ideas, but everyone has little notion of what’s that’s going to mean on a day-to-day level.
Can you make choices about the work you do as an actor?
I would love to feel that I was in a situation where I could choose but that’s not the way it works. I do try to think if I can afford not to do something I don’t want to do, and if I can, then I don’t do it, that’s for sure. But the consequence of that is that you can be unemployed, it can make you feel ghastly, because you wonder if you will ever work again. It’s worrying and frightening. Just because I’m older, I’m not ready to ease off. I’m interested, I want to do stuff.
Has it got harder to find roles as you get older?
You’ve always had to look hard for stuff that’s interesting for women, and that’s still the case. For older women that’s definitely true because writing mirrors society, and women in their 50s are regarded as having waning powers, whereas men of the same age are seen as being at the height of their powers. They are running the show and women are disappearing. We’ve got a way to go with that societally and therefore in terms of what we’re seeing on screen.
Three Girls, the BBC series in which you played a police constable trying to bring the abusers of teenage girls to justice, had a female writer in Nicole Taylor and a female director, Philippa Lowthorpe, didn’t it?
I was very proud to be part of that. You feel you get better when you do jobs like that, because you feel like you’re part of a community attempting to tell this story and so you’re invested. Surprisingly people in TV and film sometimes don’t want that, they just want you to turn up say your lines and then go away again. It’s not like being on stage where every night you all go out together and it’s your show.
Is that sense of community why you return to theatre so often?
It’s fantastic when it happens. But the thing about being on stage is that you have to be very certain about it. If you start doing a television or a film job and you suddenly think it’s a mistake – the director’s horrible or the people you work with aren’t very kind, or whatever – it’s much easier to deal with because it’s in bite-sized chunks. You do it, you go home. If you get involved with something on stage that makes you feel dreadful, that’s a nightmare because you have to repeat it every night.
On a completely different tack, do you miss Scott & Bailey?
I do miss it but it’s not coming back. Again, that was a show that was full of comradeship and very female-centric. I’d work with the writer Sally Wainwright again in a heartbeat. She’s one of the finest writers in the UK.
On the subject of writing, are you still writing a novel?
Yes, I’m now 50,000 words in. I go in bursts and when I’ve landed on it, it really takes over, then I hit a bit of a rut in the road and walk away from it. But I am determined to finish it before Christmas and then I’ll look at it, give it to a couple of people I trust and see what they say. They might say, put it back in the drawer and give something else a go. I just don’t know.
What makes you happy when you’re not working?
Well I love to swim in real water, so nothing makes me happier than being in the sea in Greece or in a river or the Hampstead Ponds. I learned to swim in the outdoor pool in North Berwick near Edinburgh where we used to go on holiday. It always rained and I always swam, and I loved it.
This article was amended on 17 June 2019. Nicole Taylor was writer, not producer, on Three Girls.
the end of history… runs from 27 June-10 Aug at Royal Court, London SW1
