To be taken seriously, to be allowed to play

You knew quite young that you wanted to act, without really knowing what that meant. When did it start making sense?

When I was sixteen, I was part of a production at Fabuleus. I played Merlin, this old wizard, as a sixteen-year-old girl with a buzzcut. I remember thinking: wait, you can do this? We could let our imagination run free, work with words and text, talk about what was happening in the world. You were taken seriously, while at the same time really being allowed to play. I thought: if this is what being an actor is, I really want to do it.

You were taken seriously, while at the same time really being allowed to play

I started at RITCS at seventeen. I came from a very conventional secondary school, and suddenly they would say, ‘Go outside, observe someone, come back with a character.’ I was like, excuse me? I had spent twelve years sitting at a desk, learning things and reproducing them correctly. You can’t unlearn that in four years.

For a long time, I was scared to just get on the floor. I thought whatever I did had to be good, or mean something. Now I trust much more that the meaning is already there somewhere. We’ll discover what it is together.

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You often call yourself a speler, a player, rather than a maker. What attracts you to that position?

I do say I’m an actress when people ask what I do. But with people who know theatre, I say I’m playing. I like that word a lot.

I really love characters and big emotions. Over the past two years I’ve become more interested in making things myself, in scenography, light and dramaturgy, but it always starts from acting. As a player, you lend your body and your voice to give form to somebody else’s ideas. You ask: what do you want? What interests you? What do I like? What can I offer, intellectually, but also simply with my body?

I also just really like people. [Laughs.] On a film set, it could be an actor or a focus puller; it doesn’t matter. Everyone is doing something hyper-specific, using their own expertise toward the same goal. I find that incredibly exciting.

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You and Ferenc Balcaen have been working together since your RITCS days. What has changed between Tristis, Scapegoat and now Please, Open the Curtains?

We were friends first. We were even in the same COVID bubble. Those early rehearsals were much more bricolage. None of us really knew how to make a performance. Sometimes you’d spend an hour doing papier-mâché, or talking, and halfway through the day decide not to do any of it. Now there is much more structure. We’ve all professionalised and learnt how the field works, but without it feeling fixed. It is still just as much of a playground.

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Ferenc is very interested in worldbuilding, which I love too: completely zooming in on a universe and deciding on its rules, its aesthetic, its sound. In Please, Open the Curtains, we are researching melancholy in all its forms. We work with masks, sound, movement and images. We’ve been looking at things like sobbing: what does that sound mean, what happens if you compose with it, and then how does that composition become physical?

I love the extremities of feeling and of life

I love the extremities of feeling and of life. Fun and lightness might seem like the opposite of darkness, but I think they have to coexist. There is nothing more reassuring than feeling absolutely terrible and, ten minutes later, being able to zoom out, see yourself sitting there and find the whole situation incredibly funny.

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After spending a day lending your body and emotions to a rehearsal room, how do you make your world yours again?

I go back to my niche interests. I’ll watch some incredibly specific video essay about a beauty ideal from the 1950s and how it relates to heroin chic. Really nerdy, niche, pop-culture girly stuff. I reorganise my wardrobe, fangirl over something or binge-watch a series for the thousandth time.

I make my world small again. I call it my “teenage girl room"

I make my world small again. I call it my ‘teenage girl room’. I don’t literally have that room anymore, so it mostly exists in my head, but I recreate the elements and the vibe. After sharing yourself with people all day, you get to crawl back into your own little cocoon, and I really need that sometimes.

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