Natalie Gavin on playing Mary Warren in The Crucible (Digital Theatre Plus interview)

Natalie Gavin talks about how she decided to pursue the career of acting.

Some bullet points. I still owe you a comprehensive review, Ms. Gavin.

• Gavin is, I think, the only one of the actors in this production who’s speaking her native accent in the play — she speaks what sounds to me like real Yorkshire!
• She has a performing arts education (school, college, university), but not a classical one. Describes herself as “not educated in Shakespeare” and says she had never read The Crucible before the casting process for this production.
• Gavin was very conscious that Mary Warren was a real person. She did individual research on her; the group also brought their separate researches into the collective. The rehearsal room was filled with images intended to provoke particular feelings and reactions.
• One of her more interesting observations: that she had to learn what it was like “not to be loved” and that she felt in rehearsal and at times in reality that she had to separate herself from the other actors in the way that Mary Warren was apart from the girls in particular. She was also new to London when she worked on the play and she felt like Mary’s outsider status was affecting her own behavior, for instance, on the street.
• Gavin believes that Mary really does care for Elizabeth — both out of her own loneliness and her sympathy toward her. The poppet is an honest gift. At the same time, she adores Abigail because Abigail is her complete opposite, someone she would like to be.
• Mary is frightened by Proctor’s violence, but also by his tears. She feels bullied and “picked at” but also frightened bye interaction of the men and determined to say the right thing, give the right answer. She feels small and defenseless, very consciousness that what she says could lead to someone’s death. Mary feels that it gets hard to breathe.
• Most interesting observation — what Mary experiences when “possessed” is akin to what an actor experiences in a state of flow. The reason that she can’t reproduce her seizures when the court ask her is that she is not experiencing Abigail’s leadership toward that state. [Servetus interjects: the scene where Mary tries to fail and can’t is one of the two most memorable moments of Gavin’s performance for me.]
• Perceptively, Gavin points out that Mary’s admiration of Proctor’s power is conditioned by the way he treats her: “he chokes her and whips her and destroys her ability to become a strong and decent women. […] he just constantly kicks her down […] and manipulates her to do what he wants.” She thinks that Mary would have felt guilty about his death but also “slightly empowered.”
• Gavin has to be “tired” to play Mary, she had various rituals to tire herself out (pressing wall, crawling, pretending to sew the poppet) if she felt too energized or fresh before she went on state. She did listen to the beginning of Act Two before going on stage, in order to recreate for herself the feeling of “what it was like to live in that house.”
• In the end, she stressed the significance of ritual and inhabiting the character as ways of “entering the bubble.” She is actually very frightened of the pressure created by the live audience but as long as she is “in the bubble,” then whatever she does on stage is part of the character (even mistakes, or slips) and then it’s all right.

~ by Servetus on April 20, 2015.