Essential is a series from Dallas Morning News writers spotlighting timeless artists and works of art and culture.
Essential actor: Lesley Manville
On a September Saturday in 2011, I found myself in London. I had dropped off my then-20-year-old son at the train station, en route to a semester of Study Abroad in Liverpool. I had time on my hands, which is a wonderful thing to have in London. So I ended up at the National Theatre, hard by the River Thames, hoping I could land a ticket to a matinee.
They sold me a single seat to a world premiere by Mike Leigh, a writer and director whose films I love. I had seen Another Year in 2010 and had marveled at the actress Lesley Manville, who was cast as the lead in Leigh's new work, Grief.
Grief was two hours without intermission. It was spellbinding. It was horrifying. It was a journey through the heart of a family, wounded by the death of a husband and father in World War II. It was London, 1957, but his wife and daughter still hadn't recovered. They were characters in the ongoing collateral damage inflicted by the Nazis.
For such a play to work, the performance of the lead is critical. It must be Shakespearean in its scope, devastating in its delivery. I have found myself thinking of Grief often in the intervening years, and when I do, I always think of Manville.
We all have our favorite actors, writers and directors. For me, Manville is at the top of the list. She is truly an essential when it comes to being a performer who can handle the darkest or noblest of characters. She can be icy, even vicious, as she was in her Oscar-nominated performance in the 2017 film, Phantom Thread, in which she starred opposite Daniel Day-Lewis. My favorite line of hers from the film? "Don't pick a fight with me. You certainly won't come out alive. I'll go right through you. And it'll be you who ends up on the floor."
She can also be the radiant heart of a comedy like no other, which is the role she commands in Mum, a superb offering by BBC Two now available to Americans via BritBox, which debuted the second season of Mum on Mother's Day. It's a role that demands a reservoir of depth, with the central character -- Mum -- serving as an emotional mirror for the nincompoops who surround her. They are insane but endlessly memorable, none of which would be possible without the foil presented by Manville, the most memorable and affecting of the lot. Mum also delivers one of the sweetest, albeit slow-simmering love stories ever told.
I'm not the least bit surprised that Manville's career has pointed straight up in the years since I saw her at the National. She was nominated for an Olivier award for her performance in Grief and two years later won the Olivier for best actress for her performance in Ghosts. She has been nominated four times in Britain's BAFTA awards, and at the moment, she's in New York, performing alongside Jeremy Irons in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, which heads to Los Angeles in June.
I caught up with her recently in New York, where she was awaiting that night's performance at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
As unlikely as it seems, she admits there's a link between Mike Leigh's play and her role in Mum, which opens with the title character preparing for the funeral of her husband.
The link is grief.
Comedy these days takes "so many different forms," she said. "There is a great desire and liking for comedies that are not full of gags, full of jokes, full of punch lines, that are just gentle observations of relationships and the world. And in the middle of it with Mum, you have these two very sane people, [her character] Cathy and Michael [played by Peter Mullan]. In a way, the audience views the other characters, the slightly more heightened characters in the show -- they view them through me."
She loves the way that the BAFTA-winning writer of Mum, Stefan Golaszewski, "juxtaposes humor with great moments of grief. I think that happens in life. I love the show, because it puts those two things, pain and humor, side by side.
"I think we are doing some really clever and brilliant comedy in England at the moment, but I do think nevertheless that Mum is out there by itself."
For me, Manville is why.
She told me she had never been to Texas, but maybe there's a way to change that. Grief has yet to appear anywhere in the U.S., so perhaps an enterprising artistic director, even in North Texas, will see fit to stage it and fly her over to play the lead.
"It's a very particular kind of play, I suppose, and maybe a lot of people don't want to go there," she said. "It is dark and depressing, but I loved it. I thought it was a great play."
And so did I, with Lesley Manville as its true essential.
Details
The first two seasons of Mum are available to Americans via the new streaming service, BritBox. Manville also stars in Long Day's Journey Into Night, which runs through May 27 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. She reappears in the same play in Los Angeles, where it opens June 8 and runs through July 1.
