ANNA MAXWELL MARTIN: SOFT FEATURES, SHARP SKILLS

There’s something essentially childlike about Anna Maxwell Martin. It’s partly to do with her squashy, button-nosed face, like a sketch from a Shirley Hughes picture book: she could be Alfie and Annie Rose’s mischievous big sister. But it’s more the straight-to-the-heart, transparent quality of her acting; she holds a character like a glass holds water, without anything as grown-up as thought getting in the way.

Her finest performances have all exploited this quality. The National’s 2003 adaptation of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” was hampered by unreliable machinery and moments of directing from drama A-level (“Let’s show the Spectres are eating someone by flashing a spotlight on and off!”). Yet Martin was the subtle knife of the story—although she was 25 at the time, she sliced open a window into Lyra’s 12-year-old world of directness, impishness and incipient womanhood.

In 2006, Maxwell Martin won a Bafta for her Esther Summerson in the BBC’s “Bleak House”, dodging the goody-two-shoes pitfalls of Dickens’s orphan heroine by giving her a blunt innocence that seemed to be the product of honesty, rather than simple inexperience. And in 2009 she won again, for the defiant “N” in Channel 4’s “Poppy Shakespeare”, prancing and pranging her way round a psychiatric ward like a giant toddler in a tomato-coloured anorak.

Conversely, her Sally Bowles at the Lyric was, by some accounts, a disaster. She wasn’t well during the production, and her voice wasn’t to the critics’ taste. But you suspect the real failure was in the casting: she just doesn’t have the high-showbiz, tears-through-mascara tendencies needed for Sally’s over-ripe sexual tragedy. Martin may be naughty, but she’s not that naughty.

But now she is back on stage as Isabella in Michael Attenborough’s production of “Measure for Measure”. For the play to work, the audience needs to believe that Isabella is so overwhelmingly good that Angelo, a man “whose blood is very snow-broth”, can be brought to sexual boiling point simply by her arguing with him about justice. Martin’s explosive mix of innocence and energy should turn up the heat just fine.

"Measure for Measure" at the Almeida, London, February 12th to April 10th

~ ISABEL LLOYD

Picture credit: Murdo Macleod

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