Romola Garai has more of an insight into Three Sisters than most Mashas. Just like her character at the Lyric Hammersmith, she is the second of three sisters with an older brother. Could there be a better preparation? Garai is sensible only of discrepancies. “Had the parents in Three Sisters been alive, the dynamic might have more similarities to my life,” she says. “And how are we in the best position to understand the souls of people stuck in the middle of nowhere who will never be able to explore any of their potential?”
That’s clearly not true of Garai. She was still at City of London School for Girls when cast as the sax-blowing younger incarnation of Judi Dench in The Last of the Blonde Bombshells. Her debut at 16 could have ushered in the sort of bimbo roles that strew the path of young, blonde, blue-eyed actresses. Instead she’s become a poster girl for period drama.
Bombshells spirited Garai back to the 1940s, and then she retreated to the 1920s to play the heroine of Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. From there it was but a hop and a skip back to the unhappy heroines of Nicholas Nickleby and Daniel Deronda. She has never really returned. Something about Garai’s statuesque allure is evidently not quite of our time. She spotted it herself when playing Jane Austen’s social networker in the BBC’s Emma last year. “Because I thought I had such a strong sense of who she was, I just did her like me. She’s somebody who really wants to please.”
That’s not quite the reality with Garai, whose intelligent career has mostly been about pleasing herself. At 20, she played the female lead in Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights. “It could have been anyone,” she says. “It didn’t need to be me playing that part. I didn’t like that feeling. I thought, I’d rather earn less, live simply and do the things I really love and be happy.”
She promptly cleansed herself in Michael Hastings’ play Calico. The goal was “to prove to myself that I could do it”. As Lucia, the bipolar daughter of James Joyce who was fixated on shy young Samuel Beckett, she climatically discarded all her clothes. That must have taken guts? “Actually actresses taking their clothes off happens a lot in the West End. Obviously you have to try not to think about how many people are looking at you but I never felt uncomfortable about it.”
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It was part of that programme of self-improvement that, having dropped out of her English degree, four years ago she resumed her studies at the Open University. And while she was never to revive her plan of attending drama college, she did the next best thing in 2007 when she committed herself to 12 months with the RSC. Joining Ian McKellen and Trevor Nunn in their globe-trotting King Lear and The Seagull “gave me the rigour of doing something for a very long period of time. It was about me being able to be part of a company for a year”.
Though also playing Cordelia, the meaty role was Nina, Chekhov’s aspiring actress whose career hits the skids. Did it afford a chastening glimpse of the chasm? “It taught me that actors are in the worst possible position to understand a play about actors. It’s impossible not to think about the parallels in your own life. I increasingly realised that it’s not a tragedy for the audience. Why the f*** do the audience care whether Nina gets to be a famous actress or not?”
Of all the Garai brood Romola was the one most likely to end up acting. She spent her first six years in Hong Kong, where their father was a banker, before the family moved to Wiltshire. “Theatre was something my mum loved and I was the one who really responded.” Her professional name is one to conjure with. The surname is an exotic remnant of Hungarian-Jewish ancestry, her first name from George Eliot’s intractable Florentine saga. She began reading it at 15. “You know something’s not tripping along when it takes ten years to read a book that you’re named after.”
After Emma wrapped she took several months off to find the right job in theatre. It’s not, she insists, about wanting to feel the gaze of an audience, or to lose herself in a role. “Being watched by other people is almost incidental. For me a stage is like a mental space where you can express extreme emotion in a safe environment. I’m not transformative in the way that some people are magicians who can do anything, maybe because they’re running away from themselves. I have the opposite thing. I’m much too much of an egotist. It all comes back to me.”
Three Sisters is at the Lyric Hammersmith (0871 2211729, www.lyric.co.uk) until Feb 20