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If there’s one thing Ruth Negga hates, it’s labels. “I get claustrophobic — I just can’t bear it. I feel like my entire life people have been trying to put me into boxes they can understand. And it makes me into something facile . . . something I’m not.” The 43-year-old Ethiopian-Irish actor is preparing to star in the Barbican’s world premiere of Quiet Songs, playing a teenage character known only as “Boy”, who is struggling through adolescence. Based on the life story of its writer, director and composer Finn Beames, it features a string quartet, plus an armoury of swords which are used on and alongside the traditional instruments to create the score.
For some, taking the lead in an experimental show in the Barbican’s small studio space, The Pit, would be an unusual choice after a run of high-profile mainstream film and television success. Since Negga last appeared on the London stage more than a decade ago, she has been nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Mildred Loving in Jeff Nichols’ 2016 film Loving, and won prizes for her performance alongside Tessa Thompson in Rebecca Hall’s Passing (2021). Then there was a Tony nomination in 2022 for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth on Broadway, opposite Daniel Craig.
But Negga is drawn to the unexpected. “I love anything that is slightly odd,” she says, with a glint in her eye.
This is not the first time she has played against gender in her work. She was critically acclaimed in Yaël Farber’s production of Hamlet, which ran in 2018 at the Gate Theatre in Dublin before transferring to New York two years later. “I am a woman and I feel very gendered as a woman, but I also feel free to explore the internal world of other people who are different to me,” Negga says. Describing her childhood self as a “tomboy”, she recalls feeling furious when she realised people began to treat her differently from the boys around her as she got older. “It felt like their world is staying the same but mine is getting narrower and narrower. They had such a broad swath to walk in and my space is becoming like a beam. I was livid about that.”
Playing a teenager as a 40-something comes easily, she says. “I think actors are perpetual children. You need to be because you need to have access to play. I think play is exceptionally important and I don’t understand why we have this idea of maturation as play-less. If I lost my humour or my need for humour, or my ability to laugh, I think I would expire.”
Asked to describe Quiet Songs, Negga is pensive. “Is it a play or is it a performance piece?” She pauses. “Well, a play suggests dialogue, and this is just one person talking.” She stops to think again. “How do you describe something that’s kicking against formality and labels? It’s interesting that it won the Samuel Beckett Award because I feel like that’s what Beckett was doing — kind of getting out of the box of the Irish writer or playwright.”
Negga’s own adolescence featured traumatic events in which loss figured heavily: “Loss of country, birthplace, loss of second country, loss of father — all before I was seven.” Born in 1981 in Addis Ababa, she and her mother were forced to flee because of the political violence that gripped the country under the Marxist Derg regime. Her father was due to follow but was killed in a car crash before he could make the journey. Negga found out about his death by letter. It’s one of the many ways she can relate to Beames’ script — “growing up can be so stark and lonely and painful . . . adolescence is the crucible we’re formed in”.
Still, her sense of heritage remains strong. “Our story is one of immigration,” she says. “Home is such an ever-changing word, because I feel like I only ever remember being foreign. I left Ethiopia when I was three and then I left Ireland multiple times, back and forth. So the idea of home is ever shifting — it’s been ever shifting for me since I was very young.”
These days, Negga is based in Los Angeles, having relocated there the week before the Covid-19 lockdowns took hold. “The light in LA is really extraordinary. I find it and the warmth very soothing and very energising. Obviously not when it’s 45 million degrees out, but I do feel like I get blue under a low grey sky too easily. The big skies are what I love. Although nothing beats Ireland for vast unending skies. Good for dreaming and the imagination.”
Negga doesn’t think of herself as famous and says she is never recognised in the street. This chimes with her unassuming energy. When we meet in the Barbican members’ lounge she is wearing a yellow knitted beanie embroidered with the name of a famous Irish brewery, a deep emerald knitted sweater, loose-fitting jeans and well-worn hiking boots. “I know people blanch when I say this but there is a sort of exorcism in performance that is entirely separate from being seen and fame.”
When it comes to choosing roles, Negga is guided by her instinct and intuition. Before Quiet Songs, her most recent theatre role was the Broadway Macbeth. “I love Shakespeare, both to see and to be in — there’s not much that comes close for me,” she says. “I’m amazed how much of his language and expressions not only remain but are embedded into our daily life. His work is littered with them. And they are lovely to say and listen to. Poetry is medicinal — I’m sure of it.”
Above all, she strives to align what she does with her sense of integrity. In a 2016 interview she said that “history is written by the winners. My job as an artist is to speak for those who might be perceived as losers”. In other words, she considers art as a machine for generating compassion. Today she wonders “how many stories have we lost because of who controlled the narrative in the past? We’re only now getting a glimpse, and a lot of times we’re relying — especially for stories about women of colour — on our present day artists to fill in the gaps for us. You know all those unnamed, unknown bodies that we give voice to. They’re not just in history — they’re now. And I really enjoy being a part of that”.
‘Quiet Songs’ premieres on October 22 at the Barbican’s Pit Theatre, and runs to November 2, barbican.org.uk
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