Five Questions With: Lucy Eaton

LUCY EATON (who most recently starred with Michael Sheen and David Tennant in BBC’s Staged written by her brother Simon Evans) has launched the new theatre podcast series Hear Me Out. The first four episodes which include interviews with Mark Bonnar, Denise Gough, Adrian Lester and Claire Skinner are now available. Future episodes (to be released weekly) will feature Brendan Coyle, Freddie Fox, Patricia Hodge, Maddy Hill and Giles Terera.

Hear Me Out puts the audience back in the stalls or, closer still, the rehearsal room. Creeping further into 2021, many have endured 12 months without a curtain going up. This new podcast invites theatre-loving audiences to re-connect with theatre-makers in a unique celebration of language and performance.

The format is simple: Lucy asks ‘What is your favourite speech?’’ From the brilliance of the language to the personal anecdotes behind the choice, it’s part Desert Island Discs, part literary analysis and part post-show chat in the theatre bar. Behind the world’s most beautiful words are tales of fake-blood-in-the-eye, audience interruptions and corset-bruises.

Here Lucy continues Musical Theatre Review’s interview series: Five Questions With…

How has life treated you during lockdown?

Well I’ve cried more in the last year than in the rest of my life combined, but I’ve also had some wonderful moments. I’ve spent the majority of the year outside of London, locked down with my family in Oxford or my fiancé’s family in the Lake District, so I’ve had company and fresh air and I’ve stayed busy. All things considered, I can’t complain.

Staged, written by your brother Simon Evans and in which you starred, has been a massive hit. Can you tell us what it was like to be part of that project and have you been surprised by its success?

It was nuts. That’s really the only word I can use to describe it. I’ve long believed my brother to be one of the most talented directors working in the country, but I had no idea he was such a ruddy hilarious writer as well. It’s rude really. The whole thing was just such a whirlwind and under such strange circumstances.

Because my family were all locked down together when it came to fruition, we lived through every moment with him. Quite literally. I was stood  with my ear pressed to the door on the night he filmed with Samuel L Jackson and we all raised a few glasses on the night Judi agreed to come on board. It was a real team effort, all of us reading script drafts, my fiancé capturing drone footage for the show and my Mum and Dad even appearing in one scene. Have I been surprised by its reception? I’ve been absolutely floored by it! But it’s such a beautiful little thing we’ve created and I’m immensely proud of Simon and the whole team.

The premise behind your podcast Hear Me Out is refreshingly different, i.e. asking your impressive line-up of guests ‘What is your favourite speech?’ How did the idea come about?

I wanted to talk to actors about acting without getting too navel-gazey, so it was important to have a focus. But the idea about the speech came to me because I’ve long felt that the actors, rather than the audience, are the people who get the best experience of a play and I wanted to share that with my listeners. What I mean by that is that thanks to weeks of rehearsals, when opening night comes we (hopefully) understand all the minutiae of a script: we’ve discussed it, we’ve analysed it and whatever decision an actor lands on is steeped in conversation and consideration. So to hear it as a fellow cast member never fails to give me tingles. Sometimes I want to jump off stage and shake the people in the front row by the shoulders: “You think that’s amazing?? It’s more amazing than you even realise! Because she’s saying it like that because yada yada yada…!”

I wanted to let my listeners in on that side of things. The close relationship actors have with the words they love, whether that’s because they’ve performed it or they’ve always wanted to. I’m also a massive English literature geek at heart, so there’s nothing I like better than discussing great writing!

Were you surprised how that one question led to all kinds of different discussions and anecdotes, both serious and light-hearted?

Oh, without a doubt. Claire Skinner talks about not fully understanding Pinter when she performed Moonlight, and why that’s actually the best way to be; it was really liberating as somebody who has always felt a bit baffled by his work myself! And Denise Gough gives an amazing anecdote about her audition for People, Places and Things. She talks about releasing herself from the expectations of this industry and I wanted to jump out of my seat and applaud. I felt like I could take on the world after our chat.

Then Giles Terera and I got into a gorgeous conversation about lesser known Shakespeare roles that we’d love to play and that was a real eye-opener. Giles is such an intimidatingly smart cookie and knows so much about Shakespeare, so he was an exciting person to speak to about that. (I met Giles originally doing a play at the Donmar, which he was gobsmacking in, and I still find it funny that most of the world know him as Aaron Burr and don’t realise the true depth of his career.) And so so much more. I could listen to Brendan Coyle speak all day, his episode is like hypnosis: this incredible Irish actor gushing about one of the greatest Irish writers of all time, Conor McPherson. There were some beautiful anecdotes that came out of that conversation too.

Two of the podcast guests are Denise Gough and Adrian Lester

Impossible question, but can you pick out a special highlight from your career so far and if you have any future projects you can tell us anything about.

You know what, actually I can. In 2016, I produced and starred in a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Southwark Playhouse with my company Go People (co-run by my incomparable partners-in-crime, Melanie Fullbrook and Freddie Hutchins). Before you roll your eyes and grown (#NotAnotherDream), it both was and wasn’t the Shakespeare classic as you know it.

It was directed by my brother Simon and it was really a play about seven actors over-ambitiously trying to do a 22-character play. It had all kinds of moments in which we jumped out of character to call on the audience to use their imaginations to summon up the incredible surroundings (Simon wrote all of this extra material, so perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by his career-shift into writing this year). We “imagined” an oak tree growing up through the floor in Act II, and every night without fail, when an audience member was dragged up at the end of the play, they would enthusiastically avoid the centre of the stage where the oak tree was meant to be!

Freddie Fox played Demetrius and Bottom in it (we discuss it in his episode of Hear Me Out) and I remember him commenting on press night that he’d never been in something that had felt that special or been received that well. The broadsheet critics actually went on to be relatively disparaging – the word that cropped up a few times was “smug”! – but audiences just adored it. I’ve haven’t felt the level of love and appreciation for a performance in any other job since. It was a truly special show, and I’m beyond proud to have made it. I hope very much that we can get the gang back together to do it again one day.

Bio

Lucy Eaton most recently starred alongside David Tennant and Michael Sheen in BBC1’s Staged. The second series premiered on Hulu in the US on 16 March. Lucy’s theatre credits include The Duchess of Malfi (Old Vic), A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (Trafalgar Studios), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (Donmar Warehouse) and Khadija is 18 (Finborough Theatre). Other TV credits include being a guest lead in Netflix US’ Murder Maps. Alongside her acting, Lucy runs Go People, a production company specialising in uplifting escapism on an intimate scale. Previous credits include: the UK premiere of US smash hit Almost, Maine by John Cariani; Daisy Pulls it Off (dir. Paulette Randall MBE); and the seven-actor A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Simon Evans). She is also founding director of Revels in Hand, an internationally renowned luxury events service that offers world class theatre productions in clients’ private homes. Revels in Hand has been featured in Tatler, The Guardian, Forbes, The Telegraph and Vogue.