‘To hell with RP’ … how shock Olivier nominee Rosie Sheehy is following in Richard Burton’s footsteps | Theatre

Rosie Sheehy was in rehearsals for Conor McPherson’s new play, The Brightening Air, when the stage supervisor burst in with “one thing to say”. There was a pause and Sheehy anticipated a calamity to be introduced. Her co-stars Brian Gleeson and Chris O’Dowd, who play her siblings, have been current however not Derbhle Crotty. “For a second I assumed, ‘What’s occurred to Derbhle – has she been knocked down?’”

In actual fact, the Olivier awards nominations had simply been introduced – with Sheehy shortlisted for greatest actress (alongside eventual winner Lesley Manville) for her searing efficiency in Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist play Machinal, on the Outdated Vic in London. “It was exhausting to course of,” says Sheehy, her face nonetheless bearing a few of that shock.

The Brightening Air, set in Nineteen Eighties County Sligo in Eire, marks a return to the Outdated Vic for Sheehy. It’s the place she made her skilled stage debut, in Eugene O’Neill’s The Bushy Ape, in 2015. She was 20 and contemporary out of Rada. Sheehy has now starred in a number of performs she liked as a scholar, together with Machinal and David Mamet’s Oleanna. She met McPherson when she was at Rada, after being invited to workshop his Bob Dylan musical Woman from the North Nation.

She very almost didn’t turn out to be an actor in any respect, although. Rising up in a middle-class family in Port Talbot, south Wales, she loved science in school and took ballet, up to date dance and faucet classes as a baby. Her father, a design engineer on the steelworks, can be a eager cartoonist and harmonica participant. Her mom, a main college trainer, loves the humanities too. Rising up they’d watch musicals collectively.

Sheehy noticed her first play at 17: Ready for Godot, staged by Swansea’s Volcano theatre, which was “correctly mind-blowing” for the “expansive nothingness being allowed to occur on stage – a way of nothing happening and the whole lot happening”.

She joined the West Glamorgan Youth Theatre, whose graduates embody Michael Sheen, Russell T Davies and Joanna Web page. The humanities, and appearing specifically, maintain a excessive foreign money in Port Talbot, says Sheehy. “You know the way individuals all the time affiliate Wales with rugby? I believe in Port Talbot, appearing has the identical stage of respect. It was applauded as a lot in the event you have been within the college play as in the event you have been within the rugby group.”

The city does have a rare theatrical heritage. “I can go and watch the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – and it stars this wonderful man, Richard Burton, who’s from up the street.” Due to these predecessors, she thought: “I come from a lineage. Individuals like me can do that.”

Nonetheless, she discovered it formidable to enter an business during which she had no contacts. Sheehy modified her accent for drama college, self-conscious of her Welshness. “I used to speak in RP loads. I felt I needed to be English to outlive.” Did she really feel that folks would make assumptions if she spoke in her personal voice? “Yeah, on the time.” Tutors or friends? “The entire college. It simply felt like I had higher nail my obtained pronunciation.” Lately, she says, “the dialog on variety and illustration has come on, and thank God for that”.

Sophie Melville’s solo position in Iphigenia in Splott, Gary Owen’s acclaimed play which is firmly positioned in Wales, was a watershed second. “It was like, ‘Right here come the Welsh!’ And right here come the city Welsh, not inexperienced hills and nation nostalgia.” By her early 20s, Sheehy had emphatically determined: to hell with RP. “I did plenty of theatre in Wales. I did Uncle Vanya at Theatr Clwyd and I bear in mind pondering, ‘Yeah, this makes whole sense. I can sound like this.’ It was just like the shoulders all of a sudden dropped.”

Sheehy’s house is now in London however she is studying Welsh (it wasn’t taught at her college) and speaks pointedly about “hiraeth” – a Welsh time period for homesickness however “additionally the sensation such as you now not belong there”.

What has marked her profession is the complexity of the roles she chooses, from Woman Anne in Richard III to Carol in Oleanna and the bullied spouse and assassin (impressed by Ruth Snyder, who was executed for killing her husband) in Machinal. “I like enjoying individuals who aren’t likable. I’m not fearful of being ugly, in character or the best way I look. I’m all the time thinking about that. And the larger the impediment the higher.”

The way in which misogyny manifests within the worlds of her characters is a motivating issue. For Machinal she researched coercive management – a time period she didn’t know when she first learn the play. “A minimum of we’ve received language now to go, ‘Oh that’s that. You’ll be able to’t do that to me.’”

She is eager to do extra display screen work and is “obsessed” with movie director Andrea Arnold, whereas her stage heroes are Helen McCrory, Janet McTeer and Sally Hawkins. The roles she wish to tackle embody Woman Macbeth, the Duchess of Malfi, Hedda Gabler and Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. All girls with immense energy of spirit? “Yeah,” she says. “They’re all excessive stakes.”