Estate of the nation

Lucy Gaskell readily admits she’s gotten some great career breaks since leaving drama school. Born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1980, her first professional gig, which lasted three years, was playing Ruby Ferris in Cutting It for the BBC, the role for which she probably still is best known.

However, along the way she also has made guest appearances in Doctor Who, Waking The Dead and Holby City, plus stage productions such as All The Ordinary Angels, The Lunatic Queen and The Cheery Orchard. Now she’s taking on one of the central lead roles in the Abbey Theatre’s major revival of Lennox Robinson’s The Big House – 75 years after it was first staged at the National Theatre.
However, unlike many actors who get their first break on TV then move into ‘legitimate theatre’, Lucy professes herself proud of and grateful for her time with the TV series.
“Whether it is TV or theatre, it’s all acting, and Cutting It gave me such a good training,” she says. “Particularly in terms of my having come fresh out of drama school and then working with professional actors who had been doing it far longer than I had. So, I learned a lot in that job and it was an amazing experience for me, overall. It was a great foundation for my future career and I loved every day of it, really.”
That said, despite this three year apprenticeship with the BBC and theatre companies such as Manchester Royal Exchange and the Oxford Stage Company, Lucy admits she is “totally terrified” of her debut at the Abbey. We talked during rehearsals when there was still two weeks to go before the actual opening, and part of the responsibility Gaskell felt is “knowing that Lennox Robinson was telling a story about a really important period in Irish history and wanting to be true to that and get it right.” The subject matter of The Big House – which is drawn from Robinson’s own experience growing up in a Protestant family in Cork – is the right of the Protestant Ascendancy to assert a proper position in a post-Treaty Ireland.
“The play is so important in terms of what it is saying about Irish history and educating a modern audience,” she says. “But as for me I feel a bit ashamed, I must admit, that I didn’t listen more to my grandmother when I was young because my grandparents were Irish and they’d tell all these great stories about Irish history. And actually, she would be so proud if she was here now and could see me playing this role! But I really would love to talk to her about it, to ask her how it was, as a child, growing up in that time.”
More to the point, on a broader level, Lucy admits that growing up in the England of the 1980s/90s she “didn’t really get taught about Irish history, apart from, say, what we saw on the news in terms of Northern Ireland. I play the Anglo-Irish daughter of this family and it is really fascinating to play the part of an English girl in Ireland at that time.
In fact, I’m Irish in the play, but my mother is English so I, in a sense, am tangled up in all these tensions and very much a part of this changing history. Overall, I guess, The Big House is about a family that doesn’t quite fit, but the essence of her character, her journey within this piece is that she is trying to find her place within this world. She feels more Irish than English yet she also feels alienated by the part of the Irish world she wants so much to belong to. So it’s about a struggle to fit in, basically, a struggle to find a place that you can call home and I think a modern audience will relate to the play on even that level alone.”
Indeed. The cast for The Big House also includes Brian Bennett, Deirdre Donnelly, Matthew Douglas, Patrick Godfrey, and Ger Kelly. It is directed by Conall Morrison.

The Big House opens at the Abbey on August 1. Contact 01 87 87 222.