The Girl on the Train's Samantha Womack: 'I liked Paula Hawkins' recognition of that ugliness in women'
Samantha Womack describes the role of Rachel, the unstable, alcoholic anti-heroine in The Girl on the Train, as the most challenging she has ever played. The theatrical adaptation of Paula Hawkins’s bestseller — about a woman who thinks she has seen a shocking incident from the window of her commuter service, and gets drawn into a murder story — sees her careening across the stage drunk and slurring her words in an intense performance.
It comes to the West End next week but has been on tour since January, and since Womack — best known for playing Ronnie in EastEnders — is never off stage for the entirety of its two hours, it’s fair to say it’s been taking a toll on her.
“It’s hardcore and stressful because I’m being shouted at, I’m shouting a lot and I’m crying a lot, so I’m having to tap into something deep inside me and my body is releasing a lot of cortisol. Everyone in rehearsals kept asking how I was going to keep it up. At the beginning, just realising I could get through the dense dialogue was a relief. Rachel’s thoughts are so incoherent that the lines were much harder to learn than if it had been a smooth narrative, so I had to play word games to memorise them.”
When the play opened, the 46-year-old — who has two teenage children with her husband, actor Mark Womack — found herself heading straight to the pub afterwards, only to awake in the morning with “a slight hangover”, which took her to what she calls a “very melancholy place”. After two months she started to feel depressed and traumatised. “It was like a floodgate had opened.” Her GP stepfather persuaded her to take up meditation for five minutes before and after each performance, which, together with a health-and-exercise regime, seems to have calmed her down.
Still, Womack insists she “absolutely loves” the character of Rachel, “a very unusual heroine, not like say Bridget Jones. We all talk about Bridget as being a ‘real’ woman but she’s not. We’re a lot darker and more dangerous than that.
“Women are unruly, vindictive and self-destructive. Fleabag touched on it, but again, it’s a twee, middle-class version. There are moments when I think I can’t believe Rachel just said this, or did that. I’ve never had that before, because normally as an actor you want the audience to like you — there’s an ego attached — but Rachel’s the one at the party who pees herself.”
Womack discovered that the more she channelled Rachel’s bad behaviour, the more she could let go of her own inhibitions, the more convincing her performance became and the more the audience loved it. She stopped wearing make-up, apart from theatrical “bruise” powder — rust-coloured powder that turns a mottled blue-black when rubbed in. “Rachel is so petulant and rude that even though she has a lot of victim self-pity, she doesn’t need to be liked.”
She wears mismatched clothes — a stained coat and trousers that are too big “so I’m always having to hoist them up”, she says, going googly-eyed and lurching forward, as if inebriated. “I’ve got better at being the drunk as I’ve became more free.”
The one person whose opinion Womack cares about is Hawkins, who came to rehearsals and the press night and sat “very quietly and respectfully ... She’s an observer but the eyes told me everything. The novel is about coercive control and obsession, feeling isolated and broken. I really liked her recognition of that ugliness in women.” The actress would have liked to get to know her better, by “getting her drunk in the pub”, but so far it hasn’t happened.
Womack is confident that this adapation, directed by Anthony Banks, is more faithful to the book than the 2016 film starring Emily Blunt and set in New York. “You need to have these soliloquies to the audience, and that feels like a more loyal interpretation.” There’s also the essential familiarity of English trains looking out on to suburban Victorian terraces with extensions and conservatories spilling out to the railway.
Womack was born in Brighton, and her biggest regret is not going to university. She left school at 15 and went to theatre school for a year, leading a nomadic life. “I was like a performing seal. I sometimes wonder how many decisions in my life were conscious? None. I was always surviving and reacting to circumstances. I took jobs that would pay for my keep and it’s only now, in my late forties, that I can ask myself, what do I want to do? I was always too busy working but now I can enjoy that aspect of my life.”
The Girl on the Train is at The Duke of York’s Theatre, WC2 (atgtickets.com), from tomorrow until Aug 17. Ambassador Theatre Group was a partner for the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2018
