It was a marathon of a play, called The Divide - two plays back-to-back, so about seven hours long in all. I was straight out of drama school and we did it in Edinburgh and at the Old Vic (a shorter version). Ominously, it was an Alan Ayckbourn play about a pandemic, before the real one that we were in kicked in. We were all wearing masks and it was about how society decided to respond to it. Looking back, it was ticking some boxes that it didn't quite realise it was ticking.

2. What has your experience at the RSC been like?

It's been absolutely glorious. I'm having a really wonderful time doing one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, one of my favourite Shakespeare parts, in the summer in Stratford. When Christina Tedders (playing Celia) and I leave the stage to walk around to our next entrance, we're walking through the trees, looking at the river and the swans before we go on and do another bit of Shakespeare – it’s absolutely idyllic. I’m pinching myself a lot of the time.

3. What was your first experience of Shakespeare?

I don't know if this was my first experience, but it really chimed with me. Growing up, I saw a lot of plays but when I was about 16, I saw Filter’s version of Twelfth Night at the Tricycle Theatre (now the Kiln). In the party scene, before Malvolio comes in, they handed out pizza to the audience and set up a huge game with those fuzzy balls that you throw and catch onto a disc. It was a raucous affair, a frivolous moment of fun that meant when Malvolio came in to stop the fun, we all felt completely chastised, because we were part of the action. Something really clicked for me – I was forced to engage with it in a different way and I felt the wrath of Malvolio coming in and shaking us all up. 

4. What is the best piece of advice so far that you've received?

To stay curious about things is a really good piece of advice. If the chips are down, if you're having a tough time, but also if things are going well for you, there's always something to learn. In this world, we can never have a full grasp of everything, so there's always something to discover, and when you remember that, everything becomes really exciting. There's always something to learn about your character - you're never going to have lived the life the character has lived or gone through the experience that character’s gone through. There's always going to be a new perspective - you could play a part forever and never discover all of its juiciness, weird details or idiosyncrasies.

5. Can we talk about the character that you're playing? Tell us about Rosalind.

Before the play happens, Rosalind had been a figure of influence - her father was the Duke - then there was a revolution. Her father was usurped by force by her uncle and Celia, her best friend and cousin, has kind of accidentally usurped her role of the ‘central princess’. So she's seen this very firm upheaval of circumstances just before the play begins and is grieving for her father, is in a huge amount of pain for the loss and really struggling with a loss of trust and a loss of ground with the people around her.

Rosalind’s relationship with Celia is absolutely beautiful. They've grown up together and I think because of the lack of mothers in the play, they've been instinctively mothering each other for a long time, or at least been female counterparts, raising each other in a very male society.

When we meet her, she's almost at rock bottom. And I think, unexpectedly to her and everyone else, that's actually when she starts to thrive. She's forced to throw everything away and become something new, which I think she finds quite freeing. In the forest, she dresses up as a man (for survival) and realises that as soon as she stops trying to behave in the way she's expected to, she can have some agency and do as she pleases. I think that is the heart of the play: doing ‘as you like it’ and behaving how we want to rather than how society tells us to.

6. What do you like about Rosalind?

I just adore her when she gets to that point of behaving how she wants to. Like most of us, she doesn’t know how her sentences are going to end. She's improvising and really is in a kind of free flow. There are all these rigid boxes and categories that society is so desperate to put us in - to this day, we're exhausted by categories and binaries. And she manages to wriggle out of them all in a wonderful, elusive fashion. She's kind of lost but she's free. There's something really amazing about that and we can learn from it as a result.

I like that she's unpindownable. She's bold. She's not afraid to take people on. She's very instinctive – she’s not measured or careful. The heart comes first and the head comes later, and I just love that in her. It's not that she just gets everything right - she's really flawed. She mucks up and ties herself in knots. But she's given this kind of agency to drive things where previously she had none. And I think that’s just a wonderful thing for Shakespeare to have written for a woman.

7. What was the process you went through to develop her character?

Often with characters, we want them to be a certain thing, I realised pretty quickly that wasn't going to be the case, because Rosalind has to be so many things at one time.

Often she has what Brendan [Director, Brendan O'Hea] calls ‘volte-faces’, where she says one thing very firmly and then one second later she says the opposite thing just as firmly, switching from one to the other. It could drive you crazy - a second ago she was fuming, and now she's really happy - that doesn't make any sense! But I think it's just about trust with Rosalind - you have to trust that the words are doing a lot of the work for you and you can put yourself into them. I often find that when I trust the words and I firmly commit to all of those hairpin turns as fully as I can, that's when she starts to sing.

8. What is it like performing on the outdoor stage of The Holloway Garden Theatre?

It is completely mad! It's so joyous. Particularly doing As You Like It, when you're talking about the forest, and you're directly looking at the river and the stunning trees, it does feel like it's quite unchanged from when Shakespeare was here. There's never a dull moment – there’s always something to contend with, whether it's a jazz band on the other side of the river, geese strolling by, the pouring rain, the bright sun. We did a show where the weather was holding out but then at the banishment scene, the wind just picked up and it felt like it was affecting what was happening in the play. Then it just drove with rain in an amazingly picturesque way. It’s great fun!

9. Can you tell us one thing you've learnt from your experience here at the RSC?

It's the value of the company – we have the most wonderful company and crew. One of our actors had an accident at the beginning of the show, and the way the company gathered together and supported him and all of us was amazing. He's still in the show and he's absolutely wonderful. But just generally, it's incredible to be surrounded by a group of multi-talented, open-hearted, kind, generous, non-hierarchical humans who care about each other.

10. Can you tell me what you're excited about for the future?

I think just playing more wonderfully bizarre characters. The great thing about acting is you just have no idea what world you're going to step into next – what oddity you're going to have to research, or bunch of humans you're going to have to live alongside. It's a terrifying way to exist, but also comes with a huge amount of unknowns and joys and kind of forces you to live in the moment and not be too precious about things.

11. Who inspires you and why?

I think it's got to be my dad. He was a very kind, wonderful man. He died about five years ago, and he trusted and believed in the good in everyone. He always used to say to me, “worse things happen at sea”, and that always helps me put things into perspective! He's still a very big inspiration in my life.

As You Like It plays in the Holloway Garden Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon until 1 September 2024.