Actor Romola Garai grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore before moving to Wiltshire aged eight. Her screen debut was in ITV’s The Last of the Blonde Bombshells with Judi Dench in 2000; other screen credits include I Capture the Castle (2003), Atonement (2007), Suffragette (2015), and BBC Two series The Hour. She has been nominated for two Golden Globes and a Bafta. She stars in Ella Hickson’s new play The Writer, directed by Blanche McIntyre, at the Almeida theatre, London, until 26 May.
1. Book
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
I thought this was a completely sublime piece of writing. It’s really rare and hard to do something playful with form that isn’t excruciating for the reader. He did challenging things with language and multiple voices, but I never felt like I was being asked to do something that was impossible for me. I found it unbearably moving, obviously, because of the subject matter: it’s about the loss of a child, told through the perspective of a lot of people watching a famous man go through extreme grief. I was in bits at the end.
2. TV
This Country, BBC Three
I’m from the West Country, so this is very funny to me. It’s very grounded in place: Daisy May Cooper and her brother Charlie, who wrote the comedy, both live there, so it wasn’t someone from a city writing about the countryside. What I like about the show is you get the sense that, yes, there’s not a lot to do, and you do feel like an outsider because everything has become so metropolitan-centric – but there’s also a lot of humour and joy in that, because actually that’s just the way all people feel, like they’re not the ones at the party.
3. Music
St Vincent
I’ve been a big fan of St Vincent since her album Marry Me in 2007. On her new album, Masseduction, there’s a single, New York, and every time I listen to it it absolutely tears me apart, it’s so beautiful. There’s something innately powerful about a woman being on stage with a guitar. And she has embraced that in a completely unafraid-of-being-sexy way, which is very inspiring to a lot of women who feel it’s hard to do that and not be part of the male gaze.
4. Podcast
This is pretty much my favourite thing in the whole world – I’ve been an avid fan for years, and even embarrassingly have T-shirts and tote bags. They had an episode recently called Five Women, which was a really extraordinary piece of journalism, where one of their writers deconstructed five women’s experiences of working with a man. I thought it was a fantastic understanding of the complexities and difficulties of shared male and female work space, which has been in the public imagination recently. I really recommend it.
5. Memoir
To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine
I haven’t read this yet, but her first book, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys, is probably the best memoir I’ve ever read. She was a punk, and it was extraordinary for me to read about an era I feel so apart from. I was a child of the 80s and consumerism, and it’s hard for me to imagine what it was like to live in the 70s… the freedom, the courage they needed to be on stage and dress that way. She writes amazingly about being a woman of that time and how profoundly they were threatening men.
6. Theatre
This was on at the Orange Tree in Richmond and is coming to the National in June. It was an astonishing piece of theatre, talking about race in an incredibly bold way. It’s a weird, postmodern adaptation of a 19th-century play, and basically a lot of the characters, including the black actors, assume blackface. It’s difficult, because the original was trying to be an anti-slavery play but traded a lot on racial stereotypes. So it’s asking you to look at that, and at appropriation. I think no one could go and not get something out of it.
