Little Dog Laughed Star Tamsin Greig Goes Hollywood on the London Stage

For a bona fide U.K. television star, Tamsin Greig has asserted herself as a sizable London theatrical force. After beginning on the stage, she took 10 years off to have a family (she and husband Richard Leaf, an actor-turned-writer, have three children, ages five, nine and 11), during which time TV renown beckoned with Green Wing, opposite Stephen Mangan, and Love Soup. The RSC lured her back to the boards to play Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and Constance in King John, the first of which brought Greig a surprise 2007 Olivier Award. Greig originated the role of the quiet wife beset by stomach problems in God of Carnage (Hope Davis launched the same part on Broadway) and went on to make her National Theatre debut in the David Hare play, Gethsemane. Now through April 10 she can be seen at the Garrick Theatre inheriting Julie White’s New York assignment as the tough-talking Hollywood agent, Diane, in the U.K. premiere of Douglas Carter Beane’s satire, The Little Dog Laughed, alongside Rupert Friend and Gemma Arterton. Broadway.com spoke to the immensely welcoming and witty Greig early one evening in her dressing room of the production for which she has been singled out for praise.

Now that opening night is behind you, how is the run going?
We’re at that point where you know the show, so you don’t actually have to recall it. It just happens, which means that it can run away. I think of it as a little bit like a well-trained dog in that [the play] can totally take off and you have no idea where it is going to go.

It’s an unusual play to find on the West End because in many ways it feels so American.
It reads to me as a Londoner as a very American play—and not just America, which is so big that there’s no reason why it should be a single country at all, but the very particular America of New York and L.A. I don’t know that world: I’ve visited America but never worked there, and this is the first American play I’ve ever done. So I was fascinated by it as you would be if you were doing a play about an astrophysicist. I think it’s a very American play and I think there’s a whole area of it that I’ve just not got.

Is Diane a likable character to live with eight times a week?
I don’t really like her much and what I found at the start was that I was judging her so that she was a real bitch. But, of course, you can play her so that from the word go, there’s a level of seduction and enormous wit. I’ve had to find a way to deal with my distaste, which is my problem.

I think it’s pretty commonly agreed that you nail the role—not least with that voice! You should be playing rock stadiums given the lung power that you seem to come by naturally.
I practice a lot on my children, you know? When you’re stopping your kids running into the road, they’ve got to be able to hear that. When I was doing Much Ado About Nothing, we were rehearsing for months and all my notes from Marianne [Elliott, the director] were going, “We can’t hear you!” And I was going [does a mock-scream]: “YOU ARE JOKING! I AM SHOUTING MY HEAD OFF”—because I was bellowing, but then I had spent 10 years just sort of bumbling around on screen.

It was fun on press night sitting next to your agent [Sally Hope], given that you play an agent.
I think a lot of people have said to Sally, “I hear Tamsin’s playing you,” and she’s been very clear that I wear a lot of Armani in the play and so in that sense I am not like her at all. [Laughs.] What I did do was watch Entourage and talk to [co-stars] Rupert and Gemma, who both, of course, know this world much better than I do. I don’t have an American agent, and I don’t know how I would survive with one who operates at quite the level of Diane. There seems to be a sort of greater madness to the extremes of Hollywood life, as an actor and therefore as an agent.

I was very aware in this production of Diane's magnetic charisma.
Yes, but, she is just reflecting Douglas Carter Beane, who’s a very tall, dominating presence: funny, quick-witted, sharp, way ahead of you. He really knows how to tell a story. Diane goes one step further, or rather Douglas Carter Beane does, by pushing the fourth wall, so that what he’s saying is, “You’re in this world, you know? If you pick up a magazine and you’re interested in who’s wearing that dress, then you’re in this world. You want to know who is getting married to who? Then this story is your story; you’re in this world.”

In some ways, the play is so ruthless about the dictates of celebrity that it must make you very glad not to be a part of it to that degree.
Realistically, I probably wouldn’t ever be a part of that amazing world anyway. I’m not Gemma’s age, and I don’t have the look. People don’t quite know what to do with me; I’m a bit of a square peg. I just did a re-shoot today for [the Stephen Frears film] Tamara Drewe, a new movie with Gemma in the lead in which I appear in a wonderfully curvy fat suit as this dumpy middle-aged wife. Gemma said to me, “I can’t put these two [women] together, Diane and now this!”, and I thought, I’m so delighted that people can see me in such different ways.

Do the concerns of The Little Dog Laughed apply to London-based actors, or is the industry here more relaxed about issues of sexuality?
Can we name any out gay young actors here—I mean, who are film stars? Sure, by the time you’re a knight, it’s all fine, as Douglas Carter Beane is quick to remind us [laughs], but that’s not until your 40s or 50s, if then. Having said that, I think Douglas has created a very particular world, specifically rooted to where it is set. It’s not like God of Carnage, which can go anywhere and is going to translate because of the nature of parenthood and the inability that parents sometimes have in hearing one another.

How do you look back on having to vomit nightly on stage in Yasmina Reza’s play?
It was really weird in that it was only water but an audience nonetheless desperately believes they can smell it! All you’re doing, really, is getting sprayed with a bit of water, but the psychological experience of watching that kind of aggressive act runs very, very deep. I remember when I read the play, they didn’t quite know which of the two women they wanted me to do and I thought, “I won’t be doing the vomit.” But then when they got to it, I thought, you know, actually she’s very interesting. It’s all pushed down, pushed down, pushed down, and then it comes out.

What’s great is not just your reengagement with theater but across such a diverse range of parts.
It’s so brilliant, and it’s absolutely fascinating what you’re given. Where else, were it not for Gethsemane [the Hare play with Greig as a Labour Party politico], would I be able to go to the House of Commons and say, “Could I just talk to the Home Secretary? Do you mind?”

So did Jacqui Smith [the then-Home Secretary] eventually come see you in the play?
Are you kidding? No, she’s the Home Secretary! When would she have the time?