When Game of Thrones
star Gemma Whelan first performed Philip Ridley's devastating solo
play, Dark Vanilla Jungle, during the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe,
the actress and comedian was warned there would be walk-outs. Not
because of the play's subject matter, which charts the car crash life
of teenage Andrea, who is abandoned by her parents before being
groomed by older men into a world that leads her deeper and deeper
into an emotional morass she eventually kicks against with tragic
consequences. Rather, such a reaction would likely as not be down to
the more mundane response of audience members having to make a dash
to other shows they've booked into.
Primed as she was,
having one woman walk right across the stage just as she was in the
emotional throes of one of the play's most harrowing scenes made
things even harder for Whelan.
“That was a dreadful
walkout,” she says, as she prepares to open a new tour of the
Supporting Wall's production of Dark Vanilla Jungle at the Traverse
Theatre in Edinburgh this week. “I figured if I could get through
that, I could get through anything.”
Given the play's
subject matter, a thick skin was essential for Whelan.
“It's quite a monster
to take on,” she says. “It doesn't pussyfoot around a difficult
subject matter, and is unapologetically directed. I felt rather sorry
for Andrea, but also rather intrigued by how someone would behave
like that. She's so desperate to be loved, so desperate that she
completely overlooks the things that can go wrong in the situation.
We can all relate to that, I think, someone telling you they love you
or that you're beautiful, so you can be quite disarmed. So I can see
how it happened, and how her life descends into tragic chaos. Of
course, nothing like that has ever happened to me, but even so I felt
real empathy with Andrea.”
Whelan was only cast in
the show, she reckons, because the producers “wanted someone who
was already coming to Edinburgh.”
Whelan's other
Edinburgh show was as Chastity Butterworth, a jolly hockey-sticks
creation who leads something of a double life. The contrast between
the two shows was one Whelan describes as “the nettle and the dock
leaf.”
It's a phrase that
could apply to Whelan's own childhood, which couldn't be more
different than Andrea's.
“When I was three
years old I was demanding that my mother take me to ballet lessons,”
Whelan remembers, “so I suppose I was always going to perform in
some form. My parents met on an amateur dramatics production of
Desire Under The Elms. My father is hugely entertaining, and my
mother was wild and rebellious, so I guess some of both of those
traits must've rubbed off on me.”
Whelan initially
trained as a dancer, which led her to doing stand-up, before “I was
lucky enough to start working as an actor.”
While luck may have
played a part, given that her CV includes stints in the West End in
the National Theatre's production of One Man, Two Guvnors, one
suspects ability and ambition may also have had something to do with
Whelan's recent success. As far as she is concerned, her big break
came in 2010 horror film The Wolfman, where she appeared alongside
the likes of Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins..
“That was my first
proper part in a big film,” she says, “but I was terribly
tenacious. I had lots and lots of noes before that.”
Luck did play a part,
however, in Whelan being cast in the regular role of warrior queen,
Yara Greyjoy, in HBO's TV fantasy epic, Game of Thrones. Whelan went
to a casting for sit-com, Threesome, where the casting director
suggested that their might be something for her on the next show he
was working on. That turned out to be Game of Thrones
“It was just a case
of being in the right place at the right time,” Whelan admits. She
joined the programme for four episodes of series two, and, with a
fourth series scheduled to be broadcast later this year, appears to
have survived a third series cliffhanger.
“I'm in it,” is all
Whelan can reveal about the forthcoming series. “My character's
still alive, so I get to do some more swashbuckling.”
Whelan was recently in
Glasgow filming for BBC 3 flat-share sit-com, Badults, a programme
which might prove a more palatable watch for at least one member of
her family than Dark Vanilla Jungle.
“My dad said he'll
never see it again,” she says, “but my mum's seen it twice. In
Edinburgh, my friends who came to see it would hang round afterwards
to make sure I was okay, and one night a man was particularly moved
by it, and waited for me. He said his girlfriend had been through
something incredibly similar to what happens to Andrea, and watching
the play really helped him understand things more.”
Ridley's writing may
not be social work, but the experience of doing Dark Vanilla Jungle
has made Whelan recognise it's power even more.”
“I read a lot around
it,” she says, “and discovered some dreadful, horrendous things
about this manipulative, duplicitous behaviour these girls were
subjected to, but weren't listened to by the authorities, or were
maybe not old enough to testify. As a result of that, there are so
many of these people who've perpetrated these crimes who are still at
large and who've never been prosecuted. So while this is a drama
first, if it can raise any kind of awareness about this, that can't
be a bad thing.”
Dark Vanilla Jungle,
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, February 27-March 1.
The Herald, February 25th 2014
ends
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