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Shining through a fog
Metro 15.05.07
Jenny Jules made her name at the Tricycle theatre and hopes to go on to greater heights
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Jenny Jules is fit to burst with excitement. Despite a full day's rehearsals, she enters the room like a whirlwind, laughing, joking, restlessly shifting about in her seat. Mention the fact she's achieving one of her goals by performing at the Almeida and she squeals with delight.
'I've been holding it down for weeks but inside I'm just like...' words fail her as she bunches herself up, then flings her arms in the air.
Jules has spent more than 15 years on stage, having trained with the Tricycle Theatre's youth theatre group.
As the Tricycle's unofficial resident leading lady (and artistic director Nicolas Kent's favourite actress), she found her biggest success to date there last year, taking the lead role in Lynn Nottage's outrageously funny Fabulation - part of the theatre's groundbreaking season of African-American plays.
Jules's bravura performance played a not insignificant part in Fabulation returning for a second run. And she clearly caught the eye of the Almeida's artistic director Michael Attenborough, who has cast her in his European premiere of Theodore Ward's Big White Fog.
Written in 1937, Ward's hardhitting play takes on the burning issues of the African-American community of its day - many of which still have a startling modern relevance - framed within the story of a black family struggling to survive in Chicago.
It shares a number of points of reference with Abram Hill's Walk Hard, another of the African-American plays performed at the Tricycle's season, a point Jules readily concedes. 'I remember Nic saying Walk Hard was the first modern black social realism play; and that's what Michael's saying about this one,' she laughs.
But whereas Walk Hard was problematically of its time, and rather static in its presentation of issues, Jules insists Big White Fog dodges the two-dimensional pitfalls it could so easily tip into, given that each of the male characters is powered by specific ideologies - from Marcus Garvey's black nationalist beliefs, to communism, to the capitalist American Dream.
'Michael is very aware it could be like "and here now we're flagging up a bit of an issue - you didn't know this", so he's really careful to make sure there are sides to every character,' she explains. 'The other thing is the language - it's odd, actually, how modern it is. Ward was writing it in 1937 but he was in 1987 in his head. The dialogue is so snappy and so potent.'
Jules's character Ella is not beholden to any of the grand ideals that the men in her life - husband, brother-in-law, son - espouse. She's just trying to make day-to-day existence possible. (Though Jules herself, knowledgeable about Garvey's philosophy thanks to a love of reggae artist Burning Spear, is certain she would have signed up to be one of his followers.)
For her, the role marks a progression. 'I'm playing a mother of teenagers and people in their twenties - oh my God! I've not done that before,' she says, wisely keeping her own age under wraps. But Ella is a testing part for other reasons, too. Her frustration at her husband's idealism leads to a shocking outburst, which demonstrates the divisiveness racism has planted within the US's black community, where a lightskinned ('mulatto') woman - as Ella and her mother are described - can call a dark-skinned black man a 'nigger'.
'It's a reality in American and Caribbean society, though not necessarily a reality for us here,' explains Jules, whose family is from St Lucia. 'It's such a mindf***,' she grins. 'But from an artistic point of view, I feel I can be removed from it because I'm not of my mother's generation. They were affected by this whole shade thing, don't get too dark in the sun and all of that; my generation go and use sunbeds.'
Jules, of course, is not mixed race. 'Michael just said he wanted to cast the best actress, which was a brilliant vote of confidence,' she explains. 'And in my experience,' she smiles, 'most English audiences don't necessarily pick up on those complexities. They just go, "Well, what was the problem? They were all black."'
Even though Jules is enthusiastic about the 'untapped well' of African-American plays that are starting to be explored, she admits she sometimes gets a bit tired of being cast in black plays.
'I want everyone to get past the barrier of the colour of my skin. I'm a British woman and if you can cast Eve Best as a Norwegian,' she says, indicating a poster for Hedda Gabler, 'you can cast me. I did a play called The Promise at the Tricycle about the Leningrad siege, and that was a fantastic experience, but I was thinking only Nicolas Kent would go, "Yeah, you're going to be a 15-year-old Russian." He doesn't see my complexion, he sees my potential and I love that.'
Big White Fog is in preview, opens Thu, runs until Jun 30, Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street N1, Thu 7pm, otherwise Mon to Sat 7.30pm, Sat mats 3pm, £6 to £29.50. Tel: 020 7359 4404. www.almeida.co.uk Tube: Angel/Highbury & Islington
