Watch a clip of Michelle
Gomez in Green Wing
Enter Michelle Gomez, in a sweeping, calf-length light-brown overcoat. A new
acquaintance is entitled to be wary of the proffered hand. Is she suddenly
going to crouch in a karate position and scream oriental expletives? Is she
about to burst into torch song? Or perform an efficient Heimlich manoeuvre?
Strip and cartwheel?
For a woman who turned the little nutshell of her office in Channel 4’s Green
Wing into a private experimental circus space, the possibilities are legion.
This is an actress who could do anything. Whether that includes what she is
going to attempt next, we are about to find out.
A couple of summers back, Gomez went to Stratford to sit in an audience and
see, for the first time in her life, a play by history’s greatest
playwright. “I have no idea,” she muses, “how I’ve got to the grand old age
of 27 having never been to see any Shakespeare.” (From her tone of voice,
you can tell you should add at least a decade onto that. According to
Imdb.com, she turned 37 last week.) She was in Stratford only because Tamsin
Greig, her co-star in Green Wing, was in the RSC’s Much Ado About Nothing.
When Greig’s Beatrice went on to win the Olivier award last year, the RSC
evidently determined that a hospital comedy with only the faintest toehold
in reality is the go-to source for actresses equipped to play Shakespeare’s
difficult women. Gomez now finds herself in rehearsal for The Taming of the
Shrew.
She spools back to a memory of standing in Greig’s kitchen and urging her to
accept the challenge. “We were going, ‘Wow, what do you think?’” she says.
“For all the reasons I’m doing this, I said to Tamsin at the time, ‘It’s one
of those career boxes that you have to tick.’”
Not that Gomez had any suspicion she would ever be invited to tick it herself.
She had, in fact, once been in a Shakespeare play. In the early 1990s, the
Brunton theatre, in Musselburgh, hosted her Portia. “I had absolutely no
idea what I was saying. We weren’t a smash hit. So, yes, I have a strange
relationship with Shakespeare. I thought it was sacred text and not for the
likes of me. Though I don’t know how I would describe me.”
Well, it’s not hard. Gomez is one of those creatures of exotic plumage who
seems incapable of opening her mouth or moving a muscle without the
intention of getting a laugh. She has the straight face for it, blue
reptilian eyes and angular cheekbones. Her extraordinary physical
performance, in Green Wing, as Sue White, the NHS’s least appropriate
personnel manager, was all elbows and eyebrows, abetted by a superfine ear
for breezy irony. For out-landishness, it was matched on stage in the West
End last year by her scene-stealing Teutonic air stewardess in Marc
Camoletti’s farce Boeing Boeing. Nobody has ever found as much comedy in the
word “Nibelungen”. On press night, a German lady whose national dignity had
been thoroughly despoliated described her performance as “the funniest
stereotype she’d ever seen”, Gomez reports. “I wasn’t quite sure how to take
that.”
The question, as Gomez takes on the fiery Katherine, is how much of that gift
for random clowning will survive rehearsals untrammelled. Can she submit to
Shakespeare the way Katherine submits to phallocratic authority? “I keep
trying to rely on my default settings,” she says, “and none of them are
working.” Such as? “Well, you know, being unable to say a line without
falling down, or doing something that doesn’t quite physically add up. I am
being wrenched out of my comfort zone, which is no bad thing.”
As things stand, she’s predicting that her Kate will scarcely raise a titter,
but then she thought the same about Gretchen in Boeing Boeing. “I was
constantly moaning through rehearsal about being a straight man. I often
would cycle home and think, ‘Well, Michelle, you’ve got to try on every hat.
Serving it up is going to be healthy for you.’ I thought Gretchen was a bit
of a bore, actually. So, at our first preview, I was absolutely blown away
that I got laughs.”
Gomez has been getting laughs all her life. She grew up in Glasgow, in a house
with “quite a lot of Harry Bela-fonte and quite a lot of rum”. There were
three brothers, two older and a younger twin. “I had to stick up for myself.
I wouldn’t have survived with a Barbie and a hairbrush. I was always very
physical. That was my communication. My mother would tell me to stop pissing
about, but would sort of encourage it as well. Everybody said, ‘Oh, you’re
such a bloody actress.’” Sue White’s repertoire of surreal mannerisms was
duly greeted by her family as “the laziest performance I’ve ever given. It’s
like me on Christmas Day, doing all my party pieces one after the other”.
There was never any doubt that she would end up showing off professionally,
but it has taken an age for her quirky talents to be recognised. She applied
twice to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama - “And they were
having none of it. Then I went in one year and I said, ‘Will you just let me
in on the teachers’ course, then?’” After graduating, she set up a
drama-teaching company that toured schools with the aim of stamping out
bullying. “What used to amaze me was the turnaround by the end of the day.
I’d explain the workshop at the start and say, ‘Does anybody have a
question?’ I’ll never forget this one boy who put his hand up and said, ‘Can
I f*** you, miss?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course you can.’ I mean, he was 12. ‘If
you’ll only just wait for me outside the staff room, we can get on to that
later.’ I left him there for a bit, then came out and said, ‘Okay, do you
really want to do that?’ I challenged him and, when he came back in, he was
fantastic. I imagine I probably will head back into teaching in the not too
distant future.”
It took a while to land proper acting jobs, and even longer before she could
support herself by acting. “There was a lot of ‘Would you like bread with
that?’. There was a time when I’d clean the lavvies in the morning - I’m
using a tiny violin as I’m saying all of this - then lunch-time I’d be a
kitchen porter, and in the evening I’d go into the pubs around all these
football stadiums as a karaoke presenter. The guy that would take me in the
van would go, ‘Michelle, can we have more than just the mike back at the end
of the day?’ I’d be singing Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town, and they
would nick the equipment around me. That was the best learning for working
an audience, definitely.”
There was a stint in Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House and a year in the West End,
in Trainspotting. Much of the theatre she did was grim-faced fare. In 2000,
she was playing a tragic ghost at the Traverse, in Kate Atkinson’s play
Abandonment, when she was talent-spotted by the American writer-director
Annie Griffin. “I gave it all I could. I really did commit to that. I wasn’t
mucking about. And Annie said, ‘It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever
seen.’ I was crestfallen, I really was.” Griffin cast her as a footballer’s
wife in the Channel 4 sitcom The Book Group. “It was my first proper
experience of television. I’d done lots of little bits here and there, but
I’d had no character arc.”
Then came Green Wing, which, for all its teams of writers and three-month
rehearsal period, gave Gomez free rein to improvise. “I was in my office
with a camera, and I think most of the time [the cameraman] wasn’t there.
He’d just leave it set up, and I’d fanny about for hours.” They were all
there, though, when her office was mocked up in Birmingham zoo for the scene
in which she sang Circle of Life to a lion cub.
“Because a lion cub can’t be touched until it’s over a certain age, we got
this massive ... child, like a nine-year-old. All these huge men just
crapped themselves and jumped up onto chairs. It was when the trainer said,
‘I don’t have any control over it, just to let you know’ - that
really reassured us. I lost an eye. I’ve got a wooden leg now. I’ve
soldiered on. I’ll be all right.”
She certainly will. In Feel the Force, BBC Two gave her her own sitcom, about
two incompetent police-women. (“I thought it was absolutely charming. It
just didn’t catch.”) Then, last year, she was reunited with Welsh for
Wedding Belles, his co-written Channel 4 drama about four lassies from
Leith. As a ballsy crimper, Gomez revealed depths as yet unseen in her on
television. It bodes well for Shakespeare’s tempestuous wedding belle. How
does Gomez, who is married to the actor Jack Davenport, plan to deliver the
problematic final speech in which Katherine pledges to place her hand
beneath Petruchio’s conquering heel (“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy
keeper,/Thy head, thy sovereign”)?
“That’s why I took the job. When I looked at that speech, I just thought,
‘This is utter bollocks, because I’m never, as a modern actress, talking to
a modern audience, going to be able to make them believe I mean any of
this.’ That was the real hook for me. I had no idea how to do it. And I
still don’t.”
The RSC’s The Taming of the Shrew is previewing at the Courtyard theatre,
Stratford-upon-Avon
Watch a clip of Michelle Gomez in Green Wing at timesonline.co.uk/theatre
But can Shakespeare tackle Michelle ?
Ian Payne, WALSALL,