Actress Miranda Raison is best known for her work as Jo Portman in Spooks, but now she is returning to the theatre in style. Currently portraying Anne Boleyn in Henry VIII at Shakespeare's Globe, she will carry on playing her in Howard Brenton's new play of the same name, on from 24 July until 21 August.
What appealed to you about working at the Globe?
I haven’t done any theatre for a long time, about five years. The last plays I did were at BAC and Chichester but I hadn’t done anything really challenging in terms of actually being on stage and having to shout out lines, particularly against the elements. The Globe, when it’s at its least forgiving, is umbrellas and helicopters overhead. It’s the real deal. I thought it would be very easy to go into some small-scale production in a Studio Theatre somewhere. I wanted to be a bit braver than that. When these roles came up, I just thought, this is exactly what I want to do. It’s shit-scary, but it’s been a brilliant thing.
Your role in Henry VIII is quite small, while you’re the lead in Anne Boleyn. How have you adjusted to the difference between the two?
I think it’s been much better this way round than the other way round. It’s been a good thing to get my teeth into it quite slowly. In fact, it’s almost the best-case scenario for Henry, because there are only a couple of dialogue-heavy scenes, and I spend quite a lot of time on stage. So I can get used to the feel and look of it. I think one of the most striking things about the Globe is that you can see everybody, because the lights never go down. It sounds so obvious but the reality is that by the end of the production you’ve pretty much seen everybody’s face, you’ve looked at most people and got eye contact with the woman with the dark hair and the glasses in the fourth row, you know? I think it will be a real help to know all that now. In Anne Boleyn, there is some addressing the audience and certain things that might have seemed intimidating if I had just come onto the stage having never been on it and gone ‘oh, bloody hell’.
How have you coped with the elements?
We’ve been quite lucky! We’ve had two rain productions and most of the time when we’re on stage, it’s only when you’re in the thrust bit that you get wet. It’s easy to edge back a bit and be undercover. There’s moments when you do get wet and you think ‘oh, never mind, the [groundlings have] been standing there for two hours!’ Sometimes the costumes are very heavy and you wouldn’t be able to move if you got soaking wet in one of the great big velvet reams of material.
What will we learn about Anne that we didn't know before?
Howard Brenton’s play really focuses on predominantly three remarkable things that he’s very sure about – that Anne and Henry were really in love. Two, the courtly love which was documented - the reality of courtly love for all those years and not sleeping together. Everybody was terrified of syphilis, so courtly love was actually a means of courtship and it meant that you showed people a flash of something, there might be a bit of fondling, but there were stages of it, so you might go months before touching somebody’s neck, you’d go gradually, gradually. Years down the line, touching the back of somebody’s knee… and Anne and Henry managed to keep this courtly love going until they married. Neither of them were virgins so it was very difficult. The frustration of that is brilliantly written in the play. The other thing is Anne’s devotion to her religion. She was passionately Protestant and a Lutheran. She was fascinated with Tyndale and Tyndale’s writings. The play jumps backwards and forwards from Anne to King James I. It talks about how Anne and her relationship with Tyndale and with Protestantism. She helped to create the King James Bible in a kind of roundabout way.
You’re playing her in two different guises and with two different kings. What are the differences between the two?
There are huge differences. Because Anne in Shakespeare is so ambiguous, there are certain things you can carry through and put into the performance of Henry which may carry through into this somewhat. I think the main difference in a way is that I get the feeling – and of course I’ll never know – but I get the feeling that Shakespeare didn’t like Anne and I get the feeling that Howard loves her. That’s not to say Howard says she’s a lovely sweet person but he just has great respect and admiration for her, which I don’t know if Shakespeare did. It’s very hard to tell from how he wrote – he skirted around it so much.
Your Henry in Henry VIII is Dominic Rowan, recently seen in The Misanthrope, The Spanish Tragedy and as Touchstone in the Globe's As You Like It last summer. What’s he like to work with?
He’s brilliant. He’s really, really funny. He has a very dry sense of humour – he wrote us all first-night cards – my first-night card said about another actress: ‘I’m pleased so and so couldn’t do it, because I didn’t want to be overshadowed. You accomplished that beautifully’. One of his cards to one of the girls who’s one of the supernumeraries just says ‘stay out of my way’. He wrote in another girl's: ‘It is a wonderful performance, moving, beautiful… from Kate Duchene. Watch her and learn!’. He is quite a clown, but he’s not a laugher, if you know what I mean. He makes everybody else laugh, but he never does it himself. He’s brilliant. He’s not a giggler at all, but the rest of us are awful. I bet he gets lots of people into trouble.
What’s the Henry in Anne Boleyn like? More serious than Dominic’s more playful king?
Yes, and I think that comes across. More seriously, when Henry and Anne were together, he wasn’t the great, fat, miserable, gout-ridden Henry, he was still 40 and slim. Anthony Howell is playing him in this production and he’s very energetic and very lithe. He’s passionate and also quite hot-headed, he’s got a few lines of ‘god, I wish I wasn’t surrounded by these women’, like he’s just out riding and hunting and talking politics. He’s quite boyish.
What’s the language of Anne Boleyn like?
It’s modern, it’s stylistic, it is written in one language but the sentence structure, you have a good feel for it. It’s not ‘alright mate’ stuff. It’s not difficult to conjure the right period.
How did you research it?
I read a book to get the feel for the era. It’s not particularly about Anne, it’s about her uncle. It’s called Henry VIII’s Last Victim. It’s about her uncle and his relationship with Henry and the court and it really does give you a fantastic feel for it. As far as Anne goes, Eric Hyde’s fantastic biography, which is kind of seminal, is the one I’ve been reading. Wolf Hall, I’ve dipped in and out of, Dominic’s lent me a copy of that.
So what's up next for you? Another production or a well-earned holiday?
We don’t finish until the 21st August but I am doing a trip out soon afterwards to Lesotho in Africa, working for a charity called Sentebale. I’m an ambassador and I’m going to go out for a couple of weeks and do a trip there. I just really want to get involved in that properly – I didn’t want to say ‘yeah, I’ll support your charity’ and then not go there. Lots of people are brilliant at having nine charities on the go but I think I’m going to be better at concentrating on just the one.
