Gracie Oddie-James lit up the Standard Theatre Awards on Sunday as the hugely popular winner of the emerging talent award, for her role as Asa opposite Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln in the spectacular — the set had a swimming pool in the middle! — The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge Theatre.
A performance all the more incredible because, as she told us on the night, “It was my first proper theatre job! It was an absolute baptism of fire, but I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, really.”
She stresses that this “massive milestone for me as an actor” was helped immeasurably by the “kind and experienced cast”, which meant she didn’t mind “really being thrown in at the deep end, if you pardon the pun”.
Of course, Oddie-James is underplaying things a little. While this was her first bit of big theatre employment, she’s been forging her own path for quite some time. She was born into a London family that was a mix of “working-class first-generation immigrants and middle-class white Londoners”, according to her bio.
A young talent, she combined state school education with scholarships, went to drama school and studied history at Oxford, where she began questioning the way the subject was taught while navigating the somewhat tricky social scene there. Her experiences came together in her debut play, F***ing White Boys, set at Oxford, which drew the attention of the theatre world.
Undoubtedly, though, The Lady from the Sea has been a big moment for her, a steep learning curve which was “the best training. We were still chopping and changing the script right up to press night. You had to work quickly, which removes all the nerves.” She says the resulting bonds with the cast have remained, and “I still bug them with all my questions.”
As to how it feels to have her first major award in her hands? “I genuinely think that trying to create some kind of metric to recognise an achievement for something so fluid is so difficult. But that being said, it’s very nice to win.”
