It is the highest compliment a writer can pay to an actor: to write a role especially for them. Just such a thing has happened to Lisa Dillon. David Eldridge’s The Knot of the Heart, which is running at the Almeida, north London, has duly won the 31-year-old actress the most gratifying reviews of a career already full of them. “Supreme lead performance”, “shatteringly brilliant”, “sensational” and “superb” are among the plaudits that have come her way.
Television viewers familiar with Dillon’s demure presence as the watchful young Mary in Cranford may be disquieted to learn that, within minutes of the play’s start, Dillon is smoking heroin. The look of beatific exultation that spreads over her face, and the sight later on of her character lying ecstatically in a pool of her own urine, is profoundly shocking. Dillon’s character, Lucy, may be a nice, pretty, middle-class addict, but that makes her downward spiral into prostitution all the more eyepopping an ordeal for the Islington theatre’s mostly well-to-do audiences.
It all started with a West End revival of Eldridge’s Under the Blue Sky in 2008. “It wasn’t like we’d struck an incredible rapport,” she says. “I bought him a birthday gift, randomly picking a book, and it turned out to be a writer who had inspired his career. After the run, David wrote a long letter saying that, more and more, he found it engaging to write with somebody in mind, and how would I feel about that? It was a really important day when I opened that.”
They began corresponding. Fairly soon, Eldridge mentioned heroin. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you’re going to come up with something for me, and the first thing you come up with is a smack addict.’” It’s easy to share her surprise. If she’s addicted to anything, it’s work. She rehearsed The Knot of the Heart while passing 100 performances of the Feydeau farce A Flea in Her Ear at the Old Vic, which she rehearsed while passing 100 performances of Design for Living at the same theatre. “I’ve done nothing but absolutely work as hard as I can,” she says.
Not only does Dillon look nicely scrubbed and bobbed, an hour in her company reveals the fastidious intelligence of a wise head on young shoulders, and the fragrant aura of bluestocking. It was the gender warrior in Dillon who put out a feeler of her own to Eldridge. “I said I wanted to play a role where the woman was in no way defined by her relationship to a man. I love being an actress,” she adds, “and I wouldn’t want to be an actor. But there are times when, quite often, you feel you are a symptom of a male world, and still playing these archetypal female roles — the mother, the wife, the girlfriend or the sexy one, the attractive one, the intelligent one. And I find it boring. Because life isn’t like that.”
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So, after further exchanges, Eldridge came up with an anti-archetype that might be defined as “the addictive one”, who goes from presenting children’s television to selling almost every orifice to feed her habit. Dillon describes the play as “a smackhead Hamlet”. She’s on stage for all but one scene. “I remember, when he sent me the first draft, I just wept.”
Does she know what Eldridge can have seen in her? “He said that I didn’t have an emotional vanity when I acted. I think it means that I allow an audience to see beneath the armour.”
The lack of vanity is what has helped an attractive young blonde actress avoid looking like an appendage herself. In 2003, the role that got her noticed was in The Master Builder, a West End production of Ibsen’s late play, starring Patrick Stewart. She played a young woman who prostrates herself before a visionary architect. “She is defined by him,” she concedes, “but she is an incredible force in his life.” Her performance helped win her The Sunday Times Ian Charleson award. (She also embarked on a four-year relationship with Stewart; although he was nearly 40 years her senior, that old head would have made her anything but the ditzy young squeeze.)
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Obviously, there weren’t many men to be defined by in Cranford: “If only there had been.” She’s joking. “That was an extraordinary piece of work, and unusual. Not only was it about women, it was about older women, and we allowed them to be our heroines.” Most recently, there were two men to choose from in Design for Living, Noël Coward’s portrait of a ménage à trois. Yet, as Dillon says, “Gilda calls the shots.”
She has been calling the shots from the start. Born Lisa Stawiarski, she is the daughter of a Polish refugee. “Even as a kid, there was an intensity,” she recalls of her youthful churchgoing in Dorset. “I rejected my faith because I found it hypocritical. I didn’t understand why there were these awful things happening, and this place I went to didn’t have the answers.” Armed with four A grades at A-level from Bournemouth School for Girls, she went to Royal Holloway, University of London, to read English and drama. “I had an idea of it being like Brideshead Revisited. And it so wasn’t. It felt like some awful 18-30 holiday park. I thought it would at least be bohemian. It was just horrible bars full of wasted people. You’d get up and walk over a pile of vomit to a lecture that you only had six hours of in a week. I wasn’t stimulated and I got fed up. Typical me, I took it as me failing it, and it was the first time in my life I’d ever failed anything.”
Having been in a relationship with Stewart, Dillon has some knowledge of media intrusion She abandoned her degree and went to Rada instead, but even on entering the profession, she questioned the morality of her choice: “I remember, early on, having a conversation with Sam West, I think on Cambridge Spies [the BBC series in which she played Mrs Kim Philby]. My mum’s a nurse. Both my parents have been working incredibly hard all their lives. And I didn’t feel I was contributing anything. Sam was great. He said, ‘In times of war, who do they send out there? The entertainment.’ It helped me. For a long time, I tried to find faith in something, and somehow acting has become my faith. Something links back to the ceremony of the church service, the ritual, being part of something greater than the individual.”
Part of the preparatory work she did for The Knot of the Heart involved reading everything from William Burroughs to Julie Myerson’s controversial memoir The Lost Child, about being the mother of an addict. She also learnt to smoke and inject. And, living in Soho, she had ample chance to accost junkies: “They’re not walking around with an invisibility cloak on. You just sit and have a chat. To them, it’s just their life. That’s the point of the play.”
One area of experience most heroin addicts won’t know about is fear of tabloid exposure. Lucy’s paranoia is that the papers will unearth her secret. Having been in a relationship with Stewart, Dillon has some knowledge of media intrusion. “I have had a bit of it,” she says. “Not for a while, though. It’s all there, in the back of my head.”
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What is most intriguing about Dillon’s transfixing impersonation of a heroin high is that she has a kind of parallel knowledge. “A good actor,” she says, “is always tuned in with what they are receiving from an audience. It’s why people talk about it being like riding in on an ocean wave. If you get on the wave when you feel that they are intrinsically with you, it’s the most amazing feeling.” It sounds dangerously addictive, and nobody is getting a bigger fix.
The Knot of the Heart is at the Almeida, N1, until April 30