Interview: Romola Garai, actress

NOBODY thinks twice about shaking up Shakespeare. A futuristic Tempest, a zombie Macbeth? Critics don't raise an eyebrow. But there are few in the theatre world prepared to mess with Chekhov.

What does it mean, I ask Romola Garai, to wrench the great, melancholy Russian away from linen suits and samovars, as she is doing in a major new production of Three Sisters, which comes to Edinburgh this week? Actor-led company Filter has joined forces with the Lyric Hammersmith to shake up Chekhov's fin-de-sicle play, often treated as a period piece about an aristocracy in decline.

"What we've tried to do is remove time, history, politics and social relevance from the play and just look at the characters," she says. "Which is good, because when the characters do talk about politics and the future, most of the time they're not talking a great deal of sense. The message that Chekhov wants you to be left with is that all that theorising is empty."

Garai, 27, is a rising star of film and television, but frequently opts for challenging roles on stage and screen. For the past four years, as her career has been taking off, with films such as Atonement, she has been completing an Open University degree in English Literature. She got a first.

At least, I suggest, this time she's not wearing a crinoline. She did once express a fear that she was doing so many period roles – Daniel Deronda, Vanity Fair, the recent BBC adaptation of Emma – that she might be typecast somewhere in the 19th century. "I wish I could say I'm out of period costume, but I think I'm somewhere in the 1920s (her costume includes high-waisted trousers and a trilby]. But it's a bit like the way I dress a lot of the time. (Designer] Jon Bausor based a lot of his designs on what we happened to be wearing in rehearsals. I was going through a long stint of high-waisted trousers and brogues."

Her portrayal of middle sister Masha is brooding, mercurial. A tricky heroine, even by Chekhovian standards, Masha is witty, sharp-tongued, a gifted concert pianist now confined to the disappointment of a rural backwater. Married at 18 to the adoring local schoolmaster, she embarks on an affair with a married army officer. "I found her very hard to get a handle on. She is many different things concurrently. Someone who doesn't say that much, but at the same time dresses totally in black, is sending two very different signals. I only realised after I started to play her that the actresses who play her are normally older than me."

Garai was spotted ten years ago in a school production and won a small part in a BBC drama, but her breakthrough came in the 2003 film I Capture The Castle, based on Dodie Smith's coming-of-age novel.

She played opposite James McAvoy in Inside I'm Dancing, and save for Dirty Dancing sequel Havana Nights – a turkey which went straight to DVD – she has made consistently good, respected work. Her beauty and talent have led to comparisons with Keira Knightley, with whom she starred in Atonement.

It seems clear that the cerebral parts of the job appeal to her most. She doesn't frequent red carpets and she stays out of gossip columns. When she toured in Trevor Nunn's RSC production of The Seagull, she paints a vivid picture of herself between acts in her taffeta ballgown costume studying her literature textbooks.

She's not drawn to Hollywood, but aspires to a career such as that of Emily Watson or Tilda Swinton, "people who have low-profile home lives and high-profile careers".

"I try not to live in the future too much, that can make you crazy as an actor. There are so many people who are obsessed about their career path, like it's something which you can control, which fundamentally you can't.

"There is the great fear that you wake up at 32 or 33 and the phone's not ringing. But if you want to work in lots of different media, and be someone that other people want to work with, you can ride it through."

Garai aims to make a play a year – "it's a very important part of my happiness to know that I can do that regularly". But making Three Sisters – a collaborative process between the actors of the company and Lyric Hammersmith director Sean Holmes – has been different from anything she's done before.

"I've tended to work almost exclusively with very director-led productions, strong auteurs (Trevor Nunn, Franois Ozon, Stephen Poliakoff]. Here, we've had two quite strong opposing forces, Filter to make the vision anarchic, to be a bit more abrasive with the play, and Sean to say: 'Don't take that long pause, that's just self-indulgent'. It was a very, very open creative process and I hope that translates into the play."

And though Garai is a self-confessed "homebody", she's passionate about taking Chekhov on tour. "Chekhov has a peculiar resonance when you get out of London. In a way, he meant these plays to be performed in towns where people really knew what they were about.

"I fell in love with Chekhov when my mum used to take me to the theatre in Bath. The plays had a kind of shocking, intense relevance to me, this play particularly.

"I just couldn't take my eyes away from the stage, because they're all just so f***ed up. It felt so comforting to me, to know that that was a permanent state of affairs.

"As a kid, I really loved Jane Eyre, I used to fantasise that the past was so much better and my lifetime was crap. There was something about Chekhov which made me go: 'No, it was always shit.' I really loved that, it made me feel really comforted." v

The Three Sisters is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Thursday to Saturday www.traverse.co.uk

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday on March 21, 2010