Theatre

Queen of accents Robyn Scott steals the show in 'Shakespeare in Love'

This Capetonian started her acting career as a tomato at age six and has since won many awards. She tells Claire Keeton more about her latest role, playing Queen Elizabeth I in 'Shakespeare in Love'

02 September 2018 - 00:00 By Claire Keeton

Even while dabbing white paste on her cheeks in a dressing room, Robyn Scott holds sway over her audience of two: the photographer and me. On the stage as Queen Bess, she commands the attention of hundreds more with a voice as imperious as her stare, and she makes people laugh.
Scott made people cry at 36, acting the role of an 86-year-old Jewish widow in the play London Road. For her empathetic portrayal of Rosa Kaplowitz, she became the first South African to win best actress at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013.
She says: "When my agent said there's a role I want you to read, I thought: 'How will I pull off playing an 86-year-old?'. I'm an old-school actor so I spent three months on the promenade accosting Jewish ladies and chatting to them, and they were lovely."
The play is about an unlikely friendship between a young Nigerian immigrant and a Jewish widow from Sea Point, near where Scott grew up.
"I studied the details, the way they moved," she says. "My mom and I had nursed my dad for two years after his stroke and Rosa has a stroke. I mourned for my father in that show, I channelled him."
"I've never been in a production that's changed people like that. One woman e-mailed me a week later and said she went back to Australia to sort out her relationship with her old mom," says Scott, who also won best actress in the Fleur du Cap and Naledi awards for this performance.
Scott likes immersing herself in characters and her current part, as the dog-loving Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, is one of her favourites. She's also a winsome Kate the Whore, whirling between scenes to get in costume for each, but she got the Fleur du Cap best supporting actress for her part as the monarch.
She discovered the power of laughter when she was about six years old.
"In my first little play, the first girl that was cast was in the role of a rose and I got the part of a tomato. I was devastated; she had an exquisite rose dress and I was in my tomato costume.
"She said her line and then I said my line and that made people laugh. I thought, aha, there is something to this."
Shakespeare in Love, on at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town until October 6, is a "romp", to quote Scott, which got a standing ovation on its opening night last Wednesday.
Farce is not my preferred genre, but I felt like Alice falling down a rabbit hole during this performance, bewitched by the cast including lead actor Daniel Mpilo Richards. Their energy was mesmerising, and time vanished in the potent intensity of live theatre mixed with laughter.
Scott says there's so much adrenaline on stage it takes time to unwind after it. "It's like a live tennis match. No one can drop the ball. You give and you give until there is nothing left."
Around midnight she and friend Jason Ralph, who plays Lord Essex, go back to the apartment they share, where she has a cup of tea and reads or watches shows like Australian MasterChef, to relax.
Scott said the rehearsals are also intense, even for Bogart the star dog. A dog lover with a 14-year-old miniature chocolate poodle, she goes down into the wings when Bogart leaps into action for his stunt. Then he turns a cheek to the audience for applause, she notes.
"I've been obsessed with Elizabeth I since I was 13 and my brother took me up to the Tower of London which was thrilling. The research I've done on her is epic. I've been playing her my whole career."
At her graduation audition in 1995, 22-year-old Scott acted Elizabeth I in Dario Fo's Elizabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman and got chosen for the role at Artscape straight from UCT. She won best actress and best newcomer Vita Awards for playing the 60-year-old queen.
Now 46, her versatility around age extends to accents. She coaches accents and does voice-overs as her prime source of income when she's not performing.
"I've always been the accent girl. My ears are very sensitive to sound. It is like a gift. I'm like a parrot: I hear an accent and I can do it," says the Cape Town-born star, whose parents had London East End accents.
"After I won the big award at Edinburgh, I was the poorest I'd ever been and thought I would go to the UK to care for the elderly. Then a dear friend said to me: 'Why don't you charge to coach accents?'
"This has snowballed and it's never just about the accents, you give more than that," Scott says. She has taught at UCT, at ACT, the Fugard and on film sets and commercials. You will know her voice: Scott has been the voice for Red Bull and Old Mutual on radio for years.
Despite her fame on stage and TV, where she scooped up her first South African Film and Television Award in 2016 for best actress in the comedy Those Who Can't, she's open and down to earth.
She's so down to earth in fact that she can't ride a bicycle, doesn't like flying and claims she is the "worst traveller in the world". Scott gets homesick when she can't see Table Mountain and in free moments she goes to the beach with her dog.
"My downtime is very quiet because my life is filled with very wonderful noise," says Scott, who dreams of always acting.
"What's wonderful about 86-year-old Rosa," she smiles, "is that I can play her my whole life."..

There’s never been a more important time to support independent media.

From World War 1 to present-day cosmopolitan South Africa and beyond, the Sunday Times has been a pillar in covering the stories that matter to you.

For just R80 you can become a premium member (digital access) and support a publication that has played an important political and social role in South Africa for over a century of Sundays. You can cancel anytime.

Already subscribed? Sign in below.



Questions or problems? Email helpdesk@timeslive.co.za or call 0860 52 52 00.