Labour of love for Mariah Gale
Rising star Mariah Gale talks to Richard McComb about the RSC – and being David Tennant’s on-stage lover.
The sun-baked centre of Stratford-upon-Avon is teeming with tourists licking dribbley ice creams as they attempt to take photos of anything with a fleeting reference to Shakespeare.
It is high summer in Bardsville and foreign students are jostling for position with congo lines of American and Japanese trophy hunters.
They all want a slice of a man who shuffled off his mortal coil more than five centuries ago. No stone, gift shop, tea room or birthplace museum is left unturned.
No one notices the appearance of a dramatic heroine in their very midst. But then she’s probably not what they would expect: no bodice, no ruff, no poisoned chalice.
Enter, stage left, an impishly attractive young woman dressed in a fitted leather jacket, a short, dark-blue print dress and unlaced, designer-scuffed bovver boots. Gold sunshades are tucked into her long, brown hair.
She passes through the crowds unremarked, which is strange because as every fourth former knows: “Juliet is the sun.”
Mariah Gale is playing Miss Capulet – among several other roles – as part of a three-year stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s long ensemble.
As we walk through the old town, looking at the Shakespeare throng, I tell her I am tempted to tell the sightseers that here, at my side, is Juliet herself, made flesh and blood.
“I could tell them, ‘This is the real Juliet. She’s with me,’” I say.
Mariah’s bright demeanour dims. Colour drains from her gently tanned complexion. Unless I am mistaken, there is a shudder. “Oh, please don’t,” she says, pleading.
Fear of public exposure runs deep in the acting fraternity and so it is with Mariah, who looks considerably younger than her 30 years.
Actually, I’m feeling quite bad now. She is quiet and guarded in conversation but she leaves the impression she likes to let her hair down, given the right company.
Her nickname is Minnie and she makes a thoroughly modern Juliet, vulnerability, flirtatiousness and youth anchored by a fierce intelligence.
Mariah says she was shy as a child and that is why she fell in love with acting. She recalls being 14 and there was an improvised drama class at school. “I was playing the school dinner lady and she was brash. I really got into it. I thought it was fun and I wanted to do more of it.”
We are talking over lunch at Bernadettes seafood restaurant, dining al fresco on the roof terrace, away from Stratford’s madding crowd.
Mariah orders sparkling mineral water, so I follow suit. The RSC, it transpires, has a strict alcohol and drugs policy and although she is off duty today, Mariah does not want to come across as a lush.
Shame. Still, she joins me in a glass of white later.
Over whitebait (her) and langoustine (me), Mariah fills me in on her latest associaion with the RSC, her third, which comes to an end next summer, in New York, during the company’s 50th anniversary bash.
I tell her how I took my daughters, 11 and 14, to see her in Romeo and Juliet. It was their first “big” Shakespeare show.
Noting their ages, Mariah says: “That’s great. Juliet is so about them. It’s the perfect time for them to see it.”
She has been playing the role less frequently of late, focusing on portraying the Lady of the Lake in Morte d’Arthur, but she returned to Juliet after a month’s absence just a few days before our interview.
She says the experience was “surreal,” running through the lines again, “dragging them up from some compartment of our minds.”
“It was thrilling because there was an added level of adrenaline. We were quite worried we would forget the big dance,” she says, referring to the spectacularly choreographed set piece when Juliet first claps eyes on the love of her short life.
“I had forgotten how energetic the dance was. Everyone has said that it is their favourite moment of the production. Everyone is together. Sometimes you have dances in shows that are really hard work whereas this one feels like genuine abandon. It is just like having a party.”
Mariah, the second daughter of two architects – her mother, Lyn, is Australian – studied drama and theatre arts at Birmingham University, switching her time between extra-curricular student productions (“They almost threatened to swamp my academic life at one point”) and gastronomic late breakfasts at the Selly Sausage cafe in bedsit land. She later attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
While she was in Birmingham, she often visited Stratford, sitting in the cheap seats, widening her knowledge of Shakespearean texts and soaking up performance styles.
Antony Sher’s Macbeth, at The Swan in 1999, made a huge impression on her. “I remember the moment where Macbeth has just murdered Duncan and he say, ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more ...’ I’d seen the play before and always seen people tear it to shreds in a way, make it a huge emotional gesture. It was so brilliant because for Antony it was just a factual statement and I really got the shivers. I believed he wouldn’t sleep again. It was chillingly real. I think that is when I fell in love with Shakespeare.”
Talking of love, Mariah’s boyfriend Charles Aitkin is coincidentally in the RSC ensemble. They met through mutual friends at Birmingham University and RADA. That was three years ago.
It must be serious, I say.
“Don’t ask that question,” says Mariah, laughing.
Why not?
“Difficult question ...”
I suspect the answer may lie in what Mariah tells me later when I ask her about the particular challenges, if there are any, of being a woman in
