Interview: Brogan Gilbert aka Saint Maud
Interview: Brogan Gilbert aka Saint Maud
Hailed as a future star, what’s life like for Brogan Gilbert? David Whetstone meets the young actress playing the lead in Live Theatre's latest big production
Brogan Gilbert’s days as Maud are numbered. With Halloween upon us, the run of the psycho-horror-thriller that is Saint Maud is almost done at Live Theatre and Brogan can stop being nervous.
She’s nervous! What about audiences?
But it seems the leading lady in this faithfully tense adaptation of a spookily edge-of-seat film has been channelling stage fright since opening night.
“I get terrible stage nerves,” she confides before an evening performance.
“I’m terrible before a show. I look so odd because I just walk up and down, up and down. I just pace.
“In a way I think it’s a blessing to play a nervous character on stage because I am nervous when I first go on.”
Having seen the show, I can say that her entrance is effective, even slightly unnerving. In her nurse’s outfit and with her naturally effervescent hair partially tamed, she looks demure… but there’s something about her.
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Maud is a conundrum, difficult to read.
Brogan in person is friendly, funny and, she confesses, somewhat “baby-brained”, being mum to 10-month-old Flora.
Maud and Flora together are keeping her on her toes and a bit zonked at the same time.
Still on the theme of nerves, she says that if she weren’t nervous before a show, then she really would be nervous. “It sounds odd but I feel nervousness is good energy that you can use.
“It means you’re kind of active and in the moment. Not being nervous would seem like not being focused.”
Saint Maud has been an enjoyable experience, she insists.
The play, directed by Jack McNamara who also shares the writing credit with Jessica Andrews, provided her with her first substantial leading role and some nice reviews.
The Guardian critic alluded to her “extraordinary performance as the troubled nurse caring for a terminally ill dancer” and said Brogan deserved to be a “major star” like Morfydd Clark who played Maud in the film.
That, says the 26-year-old sweetly, was “ridiculously nice”.
Brogan lives with her partner and Flora in Wallsend where she grew up. Both sets of parents are close by – a willing and necessary support network – and her own must be particularly chuffed by her success.
It was Doctor Who that got her into this, it turns out. Doctor Who and her mam.
“I suppose it was a daft start but I just wanted to be on Doctor Who (Christopher Eccleston is her favourite, if you were wondering). I was like, how do I do that? My school wasn’t really big on drama so my mam researched youth theatres and came up with the one here at Live.
“It was free, and still is, and is brilliant. I started when I was about 13 and was in it for a few years.”
It was how she got into Your Aunt Fanny, the female comedy troupe. There was a call out for members within Live Youth Theatre, she auditioned and got a part.
“We did a few different gigs and went to the Edinburgh Fringe when I was 17.”
She was, she recalls, “quite good”, so when some of the other girls who were 18 went for a drink after the show, Brogan, being under age, would go home.
It wasn’t her first experience of performing away from Tyneside. At 15, when studying for GCSEs, she saw a nationwide open call from Shakespeare’s Globe for people to join Globe Young Players in London.
“I asked my parents if I could audition and, bless them, they made it happen. I went to audition and did a monologue from Doctor Who (of course!).
“I got a recall and thought that was weird, a fluke. Then I auditioned again and got another recall. Then I got a part and it was mind-blowing.”
The wannabe Time Lord got a part in The Malcontent, an early Jacobean drama by John Marston. She remembers travelling home on the night bus on a Sunday and heading off to school a few hours later.
She returned to do Dido, Queen of Carthage – a 16th Century tragedy by Christopher Marlowe (and possibly Thomas Nashe) – and on a third occasion was involved in an anniversary event (for what she can’t recall) in Southwark Cathedral.
Prince Philip was in attendance and so was actress Zoë Wanamaker and other luminaries.
“We were all given a Shakespeare sonnet to learn. I was terrified. When the audience was coming in, the idea was that we had to sit next to someone and perform a sonnet really intimately.
“But I was so shy that I’d sort of avoid people. I know people who did sit next to a famous person but they were so good at putting themselves forward and I just couldn’t. But it was brilliant.”
She reckons it was nerves that hampered her when she started auditioning for the big London drama schools. Friends went off to university. Brogan stayed home and applied again and again.
“I wasn’t very good at auditioning and I’m not a very good singer. Annoyingly, you had to sing in the audition even if it wasn’t musical theatre.
“That would be my downfall because you’d have to do it a cappella, no music, and I’d never know what to do with my body while I was singing. It was awful. If I had to do the song before the monologue then it was game over. I wasn’t very confident, I think.”
It cost her a lot of money, a fact that seems not to have registered with some of these august institutions in the metropolis. One, she remembers, after she had spent money on train and Tube fares, and paid about £60 just to audition (can you believe that?), wrote to say they still weren’t sure and would she come back and do it again. She still didn’t get offered a place.
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In the end she stayed in the North East, “doing anything really – studenty films and unpaid work and being an ‘extra’”.
But she did get signed up by North East agent Janet Plater who saw her in a youth theatre event at The Customs House in South Shields. And it was Janet who asked if she was interested in auditioning for Saint Maud.
She had already spotted the play in the new Live Theatre brochure and wanted to see it.
But as for being in it…
“Flora was six months old. There was to be a week of R and D (research and development) in London and then it was four weeks of rehearsals and four weeks of shows.
“So I was like… yes! As an actor you get so used to rejection. I thought, well I’m not going to get it anyway.
“I learnt a monologue from an early draft of the play and had my audition. It was nice vibes. You can usually tell when it’s a definite no. Then I got a recall and read with some other actors auditioning for the other roles and quite quickly was offered the part.”
The whole family went down to London and everything has worked out fine.
Brogan gelled with her fellow cast members, Dani Arlington (who plays the ex-dancer, Amanda) and Neshla Caplan (Carol) and reckons she has benefited from their greater experience.
“You always just hope they’re going to be normal and nice. And they are. They’re both great.”
But there was one thing she had to ask Dani over lunch on the first day and it related to the time in New York when suddenly, as understudy, she had to go on stage in Prima Facie, a supremely demanding one-woman show.
Jody Comer, who had excelled in the piece, was overcome by fumes from forest fires blowing down over the city.
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Brogan says: “I asked her, ‘Surely you can’t feel stressed now because you’ve peaked in stress?’ That must have been the most stressful theatrical thing… I just don’t think I could do it.
“Being an understudy you get into the habit of not performing so when it’s just ‘Go and get changed!’ Well, I’d be beside myself but she did it so brilliantly and they loved her.
“Dani said to me, ‘That’s not how it works. I still get nervous.’”
What next, then, for Brogan Gilbert, at least until Doctor Who comes calling?
Pressing family considerations aside, she says she always has some youth drama teaching up her sleeve. And then there’s Your Aunt Fanny, long since outgrown Live Youth Theatre to become an independent entity.
“We’re doing a Christmas show at The Stand. It’s like a spoof of those soap opera Christmas specials and it’s called You’re Not Me Ma.
“Actually, Fanny has a lot of projects coming up next year so it’s probably going to be quite a Fanny-orientated year.”
This prompts a peal of laughter which coming from Maud would be deeply unsettling but from Brogan is wonderfully infectious.
Now, with a couple of hours to spare before the evening performance, she’s off to control her nerves with a spot of crochet before starting to pace.
Saint Maud is on until Saturday, November 2. Tickets from the Live Theatre box office.