The actress on starring in The Importance of Being Earnest with Ncuti Gatwa — and playing the first black female detective lead on television
“I definitely need a laugh,” Sharon D Clarke says. “It’s been 13 years.” To meet her — or if you remember her scene-stealing, Olivier-nominated role in Ghost the Musical in 2011 — you’ll know that this articulate, good-humoured figure is as good at comedy as she seems to be at everything else.
Were you to judge her by the big roles she has played on TV this autumn — the title character in the Channel 5 detective series Ellis or Carmel, the matriarch in the BBC’s adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr Loverman — you might imagine her to be a formidable, even forbidding figure. If you knew her from her most recent stage work — the Olivier-winning roles opposite Wendell Pierce in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and as the title character in the Tony Kushner musical Caroline, or Change — you would also think of her as a powerhouse performer who can bring fortitude or fury.
But funniness? Well, she says, she’s an actress, she takes the work she is offered. And when it is roles such as the above she’s not complaining. The downside? One great but grave role after another. It’s one of the reasons her latest role at the National Theatre, playing Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in a cast that also includes Ncuti Gatwa (Doctor Who, Sex Education), is so welcome.