My actor’s life has certainly been an eclectic one. It feels fitting that I’m writing this article in the middle of remounting my *’bonkers and beautiful’ one-woman show, BEAK SPEAKS. The tale of Gillian Beak, a woman devoted to her craft who has managed to miss significant moments in her life by playing to no-one in small dark spaces and places up and down the UK. The show is framed around a masterclass which she runs with the audience - this is based on a whole host of slightly ridiculous exercises and experiences that I have variously enjoyed and endured during my career. It was a series of chance conversations that led to me to remounting this show (May 2023) at the Hen & Chickens in Highbury (chance being an actor’s favourite currency) - a show that I originally wrote for Edinburgh - it has been going down really well and I am genuinely delighted to have been asked to play another week in May.
Sarah Thom as Gillian Beak in BEAK SPEAKS (Photo credit: The Other Richard)
My own love for theatre did indeed begin in a dusty old church hall, where I would run the sweet stall whilst watching pretty much every member of my family playing maids, matriarchs, madams and madmen until I was old enough to join them. Enville Street Dramatic Society lives on, though that brilliantly atmospheric hall, with its huge velvet drapes smelling of damp, dust and adrenaline has long been razed to the ground to make way for yet another block of apartments… and so adds another tiny count to the ever increasing trend of erasure of our cultural spaces. On that note, many years later I was thrilled to get a job performing in Lee Mack’s ‘Not Going Out’ to be filmed in front of a live audience at the iconic Teddington Studios, and in turn horrified to hear that it was to be the last show filmed there before being demolished to build … a block of apartments. I imagine the new residents’ dreams are haunted by Eric Morecambe playing all his notes - but not necessarily in the right order. While I’m here. Please can we Save Oldham Coliseum. Before it really is too late. These regional theatres are so important. Their reach goes far beyond the local Christmas pantomime. And even if it didn’t that would be enough.
It was my local regional theatre, The Birmingham Rep’s Youth Workshop that inspired me to apply to train with Jacques Lecoq in Paris. I was part of the cast of the Youth Workshop’s Angela Carter’s ‘The Magic Toyshop’ playing to sold out audiences at the Edinburgh Festival (oh how lucky we didn’t know we were!) directed by the formidable Julia Smith. It was through Julia that I learned about Jacques Lecoq, and whilst studying Drama and French at Exeter University, I decided to enquire if I could somehow spend my year abroad training with him, and somehow or other I did. And what a year it was, one that I will be forever grateful for. Learning about how to embody glass and water, interpreting music through physicality, arguing with an old french master as to how and why my abstract interpretation of Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ can possibly be “wrong’… yet through all this, distilling secrets and tips about truth and credibility on stage from a theatrical eye that I think will forever be hard to match. His “Ai,ai,ai,ai” as he brought a crushing end to yet another hard-worked improvisation will echo on in the ears of all that ever had the chance to work in his studio. As will the rarely heard “pas mal” (not bad) that induced a feeling of hard to come by weekend joy on a Friday afternoon. The highest form of praise that rang out in that old wooden gym hall in the 10th arrondissement of Paris.
Lecoq introduced me to masks, and in turn to my first professional theatre job with Trestle Theatre Company. ‘Window Dressing’, directed by the brilliant and tangential Toby Wilsher. Again, I would say I was unknowingly lucky to walk into a job which played to regular sold-out audiences and standing ovations all around the UK. Trestle at that time were making some amazing work. This job also introduced me to my lifetime partner - and the father of my two sons, - mask performer extraordinaire - James Greaves. And finally to a long-held ambition of playing the Lyttleton at the National Theatre some years later with ‘The Adventures of the Stoneheads’, an epic mask piece very loosely based on Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’. Throughout all this time I was also often improvising a character, backstage in various dressing rooms - including at the NT - one Gillian Beak, who lives on today in ‘Beak Speaks’.
Sarah Thom as DIDO in 'Dido, Queen of Carthage' at Kensington Palace State Apartments
Interestingly, despite my training in physical theatre I have always absolutely loved working with text. It was this combination of text and physicality that led to one of my most significant collaborations to date, working with the director and now academic, Rebecca McCutcheon. Together we created the site-specific theatre company, Angels in the Architecture, taking little-aired classic texts to undiscovered spaces in London. We kicked off with a production of Noel Coward’s ‘Still Life’ at the disused Aldwych tube station on The Strand, at that time Noel Coward’s play that inspired ‘Brief Encounter’ was rarely performed. This was before Knee High took the show out to the masses. Our most significant production, and I think one my most favourite roles, was probably Marlowe’s ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’. We developed and played our first run at the women’s refuge, The House of St. Barnabas-in-Soho. It was then suggested - due another moment of chance - that we remount the show in Kensington Palace State Apartments. We were the first company to produce a play in those old historic rooms, filled with ghosts of lost and lonely queens and princesses. Rebecca and I went on to write a chapter together about this production for the book **’Performing Early Modern Drama Today’.
My work with Angels in the Architecture, led to me eventually becoming a Co-Artistic Director for the all-female company
Foursight Theatre, which specialised in the stories of women, known, unknown and infamous. I joined them originally as an actor to play one of nine Margaret Thatchers in their tongue-in-cheek show, ‘Thatcher the Musical!”, which played all over the UK. Foursight were brilliant. And I say that as someone who came in long after their brilliance was established. The only devising company I have worked for that truly recognised the authorship of a devising actor, always crediting and giving a royalty payment to all creators - including all actors. The work was amazing. Their ethos was laudable. They created their hit show ‘Six Dead Queens’ which has played all over the place long before I got there, and even longer before the musical ‘Six’ hit the scene. And dozens of beautiful pieces with strong female casts that will forever be lost unless someone manages to publish them. The last show I made with them was ‘Bette and Joan: The Final Curtain’ - about the symbiotic relationship between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. I played Bette in this, to Sarah Toogood’s Joan.
Sarah Thom as Margaret Thatcher in 'Thatcher the Musical'
Sarah Thom as Bette in 'Bette and Joan: The Final Curtain' with Sarah Toogood as Joan
Sarah Toogood and I originally met touring modern-day Commedia dell’Arte around Europe in the mid 90s in a battered old blue transit with Ophaboom Theatre company, translating the show as we went, playing sun-baked town squares and air-conditioned theatres in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Italy. This sounds like a dream as I write it. We graduated to touring out of London with BAC’s Kazzum in a battered old blue transit van, occasionally getting stopped by the police, as my red hair alerted the police in London, to not long-forgotten threats from the IRA. We played a two-person version of the three little pigs to theatres, schools and festivals all over the place. I reference our pig snorts in ‘Beak Speaks’. And Sarah also became Gillian’s keen and eager protegee, Tamsin Bush, born out of some crazy dressing room improvisation. We’ve made a stand up act together, which started off as a conversation in one of the many long transit journeys, - ‘Kenneth and Gordon’. I’ve directed Sarah as lead Gnome in 3 films I made about gnomes for Straight 8 (this was pre ‘Gnomeo and Juliet’ - I like to think of myself as a terrible gnome pun pioneer) - ‘Gnome Alone’, ‘Gnome is Where the Heart Is’ and ‘Gnomotozed’. And we reunited on stage for ‘Bette and Joan’. Now, some near thirty years since we met, we are still making up daft characters. We are currently pitching our TV pilot based on our podcast ‘Park Creatures’ to comedy commissioners. Keeping everything crossed for that.
Around the time Foursight criminally lost its funding, my favourite friend – chance, led to me being invited by Birmingham Rep to audition for the BBC Radio Drama Norman Beaton Fellowship in 2012. Somehow or other through my sleep-deprived haze (I had just become a mum for the first time) I won one of the two places. The “prize” was a 5 month contract working with the BBC Radio Drama Company. One of my absolute favourite jobs to date. I got to work on plays like ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘The Riot Girls’, series like ‘The Archers’, ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Home Front’ and the comedy ‘Clare in the Community’. Here I played Joan for the first time, and by some miracle, the writers Harry Venning and David Ramsden, liked how I played the character and wrote her into every series until the show finally ended in 2019. I absolutely loved my time working with the BBC. Recording in Studio 60A at Broadcasting House, or to a packed radio theatre, - full of the history of ‘Just A Minute’ and the ‘News Quiz’, ‘Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’ and ‘What’s my Line?’. This will forever be an absolute highlight of my career. Let alone the creatives I worked with - inspiring directors, like Jessica Dromgoole, David Hunter, Toby Swift and the late, very great, much missed Marc Beeby. And superb actors - people like Annette Crosbie, Hannah Gordon, Lenny Henry, Juliet Stevenson, Liza Sadovy, Toby Jones, Sally Phillips, Nina Wadia, Sarah Kendall, Nina Conti, Liza Tarbuck and the prolific Alex Lowe. I am happy to say I still work regularly with Alex on his podcast ‘Clinton Baptiste’s Paranormal Podcast’ as his long-suffering sister, Karen.
These days I’m acting wherever and whenever anyone will give me a job… plotting, waiting, flying in and out Gillian Beak style… I seem to be getting more TV work, which is encouraging and I’d love to do more of that. I recently worked on the ITV series ‘Grace’ and Nick Love’s new series ‘A Town Called Malice’. And I will always love comedy. It was fantastic to work with Sharon Horgan’s production company Merman on Sarah Kendall’s ‘Frayed’ in the lockdown. One of my favourite first ever TV jobs was being part of the ensemble of actors in ‘Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle’, working alongside Miles Jupp who now features quite heavily (virtually) in ‘Beak Speaks’ as Gillian’s long lost love and inspiration. I’ve also written a TV adaptation for ‘Beak Speaks’ which I’m trying to get out there - so who knows. I imagine it will continue to be an unpredictable, eclectic mix. Money coming, and going, as unreliable as ever. But having the chance to write it down reminds me that it certainly has been an interesting career thus far.
If you’ve got this far, please do come to the show. Gillian - and Sarah - are at their happiest when there’s an audience with them in that small dark room!
*my favourite audience quote, thanks to the author Nicola Penfold
**edited by Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince for Cambridge University Press
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