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“It’s to do with looks, isn’t it? I don’t look cuddly. I don’t look sweet and nice.” Harriet Walter is reflecting, in that inimitable aristocratic-sounding voice of hers, on why she has, of late, made a name as being one of the very best at playing some of the very worst mothers.
Consider the distinctly unsympathetic Nicole De Carrouges in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021). Or perhaps you’ve seen her double Emmy-nominated turn as the emotionally distant Deborah in Ted Lasso. Neither, though, are a match for Lady Caroline Collingwood, a mother so aloof she’s practically floating, who helped raise (or not, as the case may be) three of the most dysfunctional children in recent TV history: Succession’s Roy siblings.
Now, the 73-year-old is readying herself to take on one of the most tyrannical matriarchs in the canon when she arrives at London’s National Theatre next month to star in Federico García Lorca’s 1936 tragedy The House of Bernarda Alba. Set in the stifling Spanish heat, the all-women play opens on the funeral of Alba’s husband and the new widow’s decision to enforce a period of mourning on her daughters so strict they’re forbidden to leave their claustrophobic casa for eight years. And so they sit inside and sew and stew, growing increasingly frustrated by the promise of men, sex, and life that sits just beyond their front door.
“The patriarchy is, occasionally, very well run by matriarchs,” says Walter of the play, which, written just before the start of the Spanish Civil War and Lorca’s own violent death at the hands of Nationalists, is often read as a critique of the country’s then fascist forces. “Bernarda is sort of a lieutenant of the patriarchy. And so the house itself is a model of a society that is run on repression and fear.”
“I think, basically, fear is the root of all evil,” Walter continues. “And I think when I have to play somebody unpleasant I usually deal with what’s making them frightened. And she’s frightened of chaos, of sexuality.”
She doesn’t look fearful today, with hair the color of thunder clouds, elegant in a simple sleeveless tank dress, even on an unusually sweltering morning for Chiswick in the early autumn. We have convened close to the home Walter shares with her husband of 12 years, the American actor Guy Paul, at the universally acknowledged meeting point of the middle classes (Gail’s), from where we walk to Walter’s favored café for a couple of iced coffees. It is apparent she is nowhere near as stern nor cynical as her characters might have you believe. She has a mischievous wit, is warm, direct, generous with her thoughts and opinions. “I do look more angry than I feel,” she admits, sucking on a straw, but promises that “inside, I’m smiling”.
There won’t be much smiling in her new production, directed by Rebecca Frecknall (recent successes include Eddie Redmayne’s Cabaret and Paul Mescal’s A Streetcar Named Desire) and written by play and screenwriter Alice Birch (who coincidentally did some work on Succession and has put her own spin on Lorca’s script). Walter was the obvious choice, says Birch. “She can be savage and brutal but then, in the next breath, [show] all the vulnerability that explains that behavior. And she’s so funny.”
Bernarda Alba marks something of a stage return for Walter after an unexpected late-career detour into TV and film, which means she can no longer freely walk the streets of Chiswick dressed like “a bag lady.” Following her training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Walter pursued theatre roles or, rather, those were the roles she was offered. Again, it has “to do with looks,” she says. Hers was not considered a face for film.
“It seems to me that there were some old-fashioned attitudes around when I was coming up,” she says. When she was starting out, somebody (a man) said, “‘I would get your nose done,’” she recalls. “And somebody else said, ‘You should fix your teeth.’ And I ignored them. Partly out of laziness, partly because I never thought of myself as a looker.” She looks so wonderful today, it’s hard to square. And anyway, “Bit by bit, I got a reputation for being good at acting, which was great,” she says.
When she was training she shared a house with six others in London, though, as a descendent of John Walter, the founder of The Times, and the niece of actor Christopher Lee, hers wasn’t strictly a struggling artist’s existence. “I did all that student living for a bit, but I did have, you know, very comfortable parents to go back to at the weekend,” she says with a knowing laugh. She describes her mother as a “softie” who “always wanted to supplement me, but I always said no, because I wanted to do it by myself.”
And she did. She has been a stalwart of the Royal Shakespeare Company, received a Tony nomination and an Olivier award, before being bestowed a damehood for her services to drama in 2011. In 2012, she starred in a pioneering, landscape-altering all-female Julius Caesar at Donmar Warehouse, affirming her reputation as one of the finest talents of her generation. But as she approached 50, a scarcity of older women in her industry left her “looking for role models,” she says. “Do I want to try and look younger? And do I want to do a lot of face surgery?” were questions she was asking herself and what “motivated” her to self-publish a photo book of 50-plus women in 2011 entitled Facing It. “It was me trying to accept [aging].”
I wonder if she has. She has previously said she never felt “cut out” to have children. “I punish myself and think, ‘Gosh, am I very selfish because I’ve travelled light-footedly through life?’ I do feel weird sometimes that I haven’t actually done that thing of giving birth. Here I am, at the end of my life, and I never did that? That’s gonna make you feel very old and gray.”
It’s clear there is so much she still wants to say and do, and this play and its themes have struck a chord. “What I really hope our production will leave people with is that dictatorships will always collapse,” she says. “The thing you’re most frightened of will bleed out to the edges and turn in on you. You can’t sit on a thing like human sexuality; you can’t shut out the need for individual freedom. We’ve got plenty of examples in the world at the moment and they do a lot of damage along the way. But they can’t ultimately win.” A beat. “Please.”
The House of Bernarda Alba will be at London’s National Theatre from November 16 to January 6, 2024.