Fittingly for the week following Mother’s Day, Matthew Amer talks to stage and real-life mother Nicola Stephenson about War Horse, hormones and wardrobe malfunctions…
To misquote Aspects Of Love, “Motherhood changes everything”. But it doesn’t take the intelligence of a multi-millionaire theatrical impresario to acknowledge that sharing your world with a tiny, nappy-filling, food-demanding dependant changes your life considerably. Tell anyone you are expecting a baby and many a weary parent will shake their head, tut and mutter something encouraging about enjoying sleep while you still have the chance or doing something you enjoy before all your decisions are dominated by whether there is a nappy changing facility nearby or if breast-feeding is looked on as an aberration.
It is less obvious that the addition of a tiny bundle of joy, or a slightly larger one – they grow too, you know – would have any effect on the way a performer goes about their job. But Nicola Stephenson, who, along with former Casualty and The Bill star Patrick Robinson is the most high profile of War Horse’s new cast members, is proof that this is the case: “I think being a mother has changed me as an actress. Your emotions are a lot nearer the surface. I can’t watch the news any more. I can cry at the drop of a hat. I don’t think the hormones leave you for ages afterwards.”
You would think having such swift access to your emotions would make the job of being an actor that much easier, like a plumber with adjustable spanners for hands or an estate agent with a natural gift for lying. In fact, if mother of two Stephenson had taken almost any other acting job, she would be laughing – or crying, depending on what she had just seen, heard or smelt – but in War Horse, she plays Rose Narracott, mother of Albert, a boy who runs away to the First World War to try and find the horse he raised.
“I’ve got to be careful,” Stephenson explains, “because I think mothers were a bit different in those days… on farms… in Devon… than we are in North London in 2011. I think it’s a lot more touchy feely now. It’s a lot more listening to the children and ‘What do you think about using the potty? Not today… okay’. We’re all very sensitive to our children now and there’s lots of kissing and cuddling and talking about our feelings. There wasn’t in 1910 in Devon. It was all ‘Get to school then work on the farm.’ It was quite unsentimental. If you think about our grandparents, they showed their affection in different ways. They were always there to help and would do anything for you, but it wasn’t a kind of kissy, huggy, touchy, feely parenting, was it? My biggest challenge has been to keep her unsentimental.”
“I can cry at the drop of a hat”
As I chat to Stephenson on the phone, a reminder about her motherly status is never far from my ears; gurgles, giggles and screams punctuate the interview as her six-month-old offers suitable comments to the conversation.
For Stephenson, War Horse is a rare stage excursion in a career that has been dominated by TV roles. Having grown up with the idea that she would make a living on the stage, she was offered a part in long-running Liverpudlian soap opera Brookside when she was just 18 and “ended up drifting into television”. Three years in Brookside – which threw Stephenson into the limelight when she shared the UK’s first pre-watershed TV lesbian kiss with Anna Friel – has been followed by three years in Holby City and leading roles in series including Clocking Off, The Chase, Northern Lights and City Lights. While doing so much television may have been beneficial to her bank balance it has been detrimental to her stage ambitions as casting agents pigeonhole her as a small screen performer. “The theatre that I have done has been with directors that have seen me do stuff on the television but who aren’t snobby about it.” Interestingly enough, among those few theatre credits are A Patriot For Me with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Edmund and His Girl Friday at the National Theatre; not bad institutions to have taken your theatrical career seriously.
The leap to screen fame while still a teenager meant that Stephenson missed out on receiving any formal training at a drama school. “I can’t regret it,” she says, “because I’ve worked. Sadly there are so many brilliant actors who don’t work. I’ve been really lucky in that I’ve worked with brilliant directors. I worked with Peter Gill at the RSC, brilliant directors [Edward Hall and Jack O’Brien] and all the voice people at the National who help you with projection and technique. I learned along the way. I learned a lot of telly technique at Brookside. I don’t know if I would have been a different actress if I’d gone to drama school. I don’t know if I’d have worked. I got that opportunity to go into Brookside and I just thought ‘You might not ever get a break like that ever again.’ What would be the point in having all that knowledge and skill having gone to drama school but never getting the break?”
Coming back to the stage could have been daunting, yet happily the actress admits, giggling, “the pressure isn’t on me so much, because people mostly come to see the horses”. That, of course, is not the entire truth; without the actors, the puppets would still look fantastic but would be soulless and about as mobile as a dozing newborn.
In fact, the first two days of Stephenson’s rehearsal period was spent solely in puppetry workshops. “If you’re not actually operating the puppets,” she explains, “you’re acting with the puppet, so you need to know how to move with a puppet to give that puppet life even if you’re not inside it.”
“The pressure isn’t on me so much, because people mostly come to see the horses”
Clearly, though, the War Horse casting director knew nothing of Stephenson’s self-confessed clumsiness. So many puppets, so many possibilities. She is petrified of dropping one of the boats she has to carry, creating an unscripted shipwreck as, in the plot, the horses are transported across the channel to France. While such a tempestuous catastrophe is yet to occur, there has been a potentially more embarrassing wardrobe malfunction when the clasp on Stephenson’s skirt broke and she felt the fear of too much exposure. “I had to do the rest of the scene holding it together at the back,” she laughs. “It just looked like Rose had a really bad back all of a sudden.”
It is not just the thought of accidentally hobbling a horse or stamping on a swallow that worried Stephenson before joining the production, but also the length – 10 months – of her contract. While she has been a series regular on television, she relishes the chopping and changing of leaving one job behind to start on a new challenge. “When everybody’s crying at the wrap party,” she says, “I’m always quite excited to move on to the next thing.”
“Coming into War Horse, it was a little bit daunting to think that I’m going to be 10 months doing the same play. That is a big thing for me. What does that feel like? Do you get to the point of groundhog day? Do you still find ways to make it fresh and interesting six months down the line? That was the thing I was asking the existing cast. They all said the thing that keeps it alive is the audience’s reaction to it.”
That reaction is a treat Stephenson is already getting a kick from, night after night. “It’s amazing to be part of something that just everybody loves. There’s never any negative feedback. In the curtain call every night people stand up and clap and cheer. The looks on people’s faces, if they’ve managed to stop crying… it’s just so rewarding.”
In fact, having committed to stepping away from the cameras for the best part of a year, Stephenson has got a taste for the stage again and the aspiring actress who thought she would make her living in the theatre is beginning to re-emerge. Of course, it helps that West End working hours fit brilliantly with being a mum to small children. “While they’re not at school it’s so nice to be able to have them in the day and go and work at night. It’s just perfect.”
As her youngest gives a perfectly timed shout of agreement, Stephenson goes happily back to her day job.
MA