To survive in acting, she thought she had to nail received pronunciation. Then she remembered Port Talbot’s extraordinary lineage, reverted to her native accent – and everything changed
Rosie Sheehy was in rehearsals for Conor McPherson’s new play, The Brightening Air, when the stage manager burst in with “something to say”. There was a pause and Sheehy expected a calamity to be announced. Her co-stars Brian Gleeson and Chris O’Dowd, who play her siblings, were present but not Derbhle Crotty. “For a second I thought, ‘What’s happened to Derbhle – has she been knocked down?’”
In fact, the Olivier awards nominations had just been announced – with Sheehy shortlisted for best actress (alongside eventual winner Lesley Manville) for her searing performance in Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 expressionist play Machinal, at the Old Vic in London. “It was hard to process,” says Sheehy, her face still bearing some of that surprise.
The Brightening Air, set in 1980s County Sligo in Ireland, marks a return to the Old Vic for Sheehy. It’s where she made her professional stage debut, in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, in 2015. She was 20 and fresh out of Rada. Sheehy has now starred in several plays she loved as a student, including Machinal and David Mamet’s Oleanna. She met McPherson when she was at Rada, after being invited to workshop his Bob Dylan musical Girl from the North Country….