Rosie Sheehy was in rehearsals for Conor McPherson’s new play, The Brightening Air, when the stage manager burst in with “something to say”. There was a pause and Sheehy expected a calamity to be announced. Her co-stars Brian Gleeson and Chris O’Dowd, who play her siblings, were present but not Derbhle Crotty. “For a second I thought, ‘What’s happened to Derbhle – has she been knocked down?’”
In fact, the Olivier awards nominations had just been announced – with Sheehy shortlisted for best actress (alongside eventual winner Lesley Manville) for her searing performance in Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist play Machinal, at the Old Vic in London. “It was hard to process,” says Sheehy, her face still bearing some of that surprise.
The Brightening Air, set in 1980s County Sligo in Ireland, marks a return to the Old Vic for Sheehy. It’s where she made her professional stage debut, inEugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape,in 2015. She was 20 and fresh out of Rada. Sheehy has now starred in several plays she loved as a student, including Machinal and David Mamet’sOleanna. She met McPherson when she was at Rada, after being invited to workshop his Bob Dylan musicalGirl from the North Country.
She very nearly didn’t become an actor at all, though. Growing up in a middle-class household in Port Talbot, southWales, she enjoyed science at school and took ballet, contemporary dance and tap lessons as a child. Her father, a design engineer at the steelworks, is also a keen cartoonist and harmonica player. Her mother, a primary school teacher, loves the arts too. Growing up they would watch musicals together.
Sheehy saw her first play at 17: Waiting for Godot, staged by Swansea’s Volcano theatre, which was “properly mind-blowing” for the “expansive nothingness being allowed to happen on stage – a sense of nothing going on and everything going on”.
She joined the West Glamorgan YouthTheatre, whose graduates include Michael Sheen, Russell T Davies and Joanna Page. The arts, and acting in particular, hold a high currency in Port Talbot, says Sheehy. “You know how people always associate Wales with rugby? I think in Port Talbot, acting has the same level of respect. It was applauded as much if you were in the school play as if you were in the rugby team.”
The town does have an extraordinary theatrical heritage. “I can go and watch the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – and it stars this amazing man, Richard Burton, who’s from up the road.” Thanks to those predecessors, she thought: “I come from a lineage. People like mecando this.”
Still, she found it daunting to enter an industry in which she had no contacts. Sheehy changed her accent for drama school, self-conscious of her Welshness. “I used to talk in RP a lot. I felt I had to be English to survive.” Did she feel that people would make assumptions if she spoke in her own voice? “Yeah, at the time.” Tutors or peers? “The whole school. It just felt like I had better nail my received pronunciation.” These days, she says, “the conversation on diversity and representation has come on, and thank God for that”.
Sophie Melville’s solo role inIphigenia in Splott, Gary Owen’s acclaimed play which is firmly located in Wales, was a watershed moment. “It was like, ‘Here come the Welsh!’ And here come the urban Welsh, not green hills and country nostalgia.” By her early 20s, Sheehy had emphatically decided: to hell with RP. “I did a lot of theatre in Wales. I did Uncle Vanya at Theatr Clwyd and I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, this makes total sense. I can sound like this.’ It was like the shoulders suddenly dropped.”
Sheehy’s home is now in London but she is learning Welsh (it wasn’t taught at her school) and speaks pointedly about “hiraeth” – a Welsh term for homesickness but “also the feeling like you no longer belong there”.
What has marked her career is the complexity of the roles she chooses, from Lady Anne in Richard III to Carol in Oleanna and the bullied wife and murderer (inspired by Ruth Snyder, who was executed for killing her husband) in Machinal. “I like playing people who aren’t likable. I’m not frightened of being ugly, in character or the way I look. I’m always interested in that. And the bigger the obstacle the better.”
The way misogyny manifests in the worlds of her characters is a motivating factor. For Machinal she researched coercive control – a term she did not know when she first read the play. “At least we’ve got language now to go, ‘Oh that’sthat. You can’t dothatto me.’”
She is keen to do more screen work and is “obsessed” with film directorAndrea Arnold, while herstageheroesare Helen McCrory, Janet McTeer and Sally Hawkins. The roles she would like to take on include Lady Macbeth, the Duchess of Malfi, Hedda Gabler and Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. All women with immense strength of spirit? “Yeah,” she says. “They’re all high stakes.”
The Brightening Air is at theOld Vic, London, until 14 June