Ones to watch in 2024: Catriona Faint

After breakthrough roles in The Tempest at the Tron and in the NTS’s Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning, Catriona Faint is playing the lead in Rona Munro’s James V: Katherine, writes Mark Fisher

Call it chance, call it versatility, but so far in her short career Catriona Faint has played more men than women. As a student at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, the Greenock-born actor played Lord Henry Carey, a 16th-century nobleman, in Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia. In Andy Arnold’s all-female production of The Tempest at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre in 2021, she played the scheming Sebastian, her first professional role. And in the National Theatre of Scotland’s recent Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning, a feminist take on the Bram Stoker classic, she played Jonathan Harker, gamely venturing into Transylvania.

“I love playing men,” says Faint. “It brings me such joy. Jonathan in Dracula had a lot of misogynistic sayings but was also a hopeless romantic. I always get cast as the guy seeking the girl; there’s something about them but they’re maybe not all there. Everyone was coming up to me afterwards saying, ‘I really fancy Jonathan.’ And that was male and female. I was like, ‘Listen, Jonathan’s a catch.’”

Her next major role is a chance for Faint to correct the balance. In April, she will take the lead role in James V: Katherine, the latest in Rona Munro’s sequence of dramas about Scotland’s kings. She will be playing Katherine Hamilton, a 19-year-old caught up in the early Scottish Reformation.

Known as the James Plays, Munro’s history cycle began with a 15th-century trilogy about James I, II and III, performed in an all-day marathon in 2014. After that came James IV: Queen Of The Fight, about two Moorish women in the Scottish court of 1504. Meanwhile London audiences had a chance to see Mary, a companion piece about Mary Queen of Scots.

The latest instalment, more intimate in scale, takes us to a 16th-century courtroom where James V is presiding over the case of Katherine Hamilton, accused of heresy for her Protestant beliefs. Six years earlier her older brother Patrick had been executed – and effectively martyred – for preaching against the Roman Catholic church.

Their mother was the granddaughter of James II, making them distant cousins of the king. But royal connections are no guarantee of Katherine’s safety.

“It’s also a love story – and a queer love story which I’m excited about because I identify as bisexual and this will be my first queer role,” says Faint, who cut her teeth from the age of five at Thistle Theatre Company in Greenock where she lives again now. “Patrick Hamilton has got this big page on Wikipedia but if you type in Katherine Hamilton you get nothing apart from a footnote on his page. It means we can discover Katherine together and give her a voice.”

Catriona Faint PIC: Andrew Low

Co-produced by Raw Material and Capital Theatres for a two-month tour, it will be directed by Orla O’Loughlin who last worked with Faint on Enough Of Him. This was the CATS award-winning four-hander by May Sumbwanyambe based on the true story of Joseph Knight, a slave who, in 1778, persuaded the courts he should be free to leave the employment of his owner. Faint played Knight’s wife, a housemaid on the bottom of the social pecking order.

She is delighted to be working again with O’Loughlin, the former artistic director of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre. “It was a very collaborative process and Orla was open to hearing what I would suggest,” says the actor, who also harbours ambitions to direct. “That was the first time I felt I could have an impact. She’ll come in with an idea but she’s very open for that idea to change if there’s a better one. She creates such a brave and safe space where you feel you can be bold and speak up.”

That kind of sensitivity is important to her. Describing herself as neurodivergent, she is aware of not always behaving as others do. “I’ve got ADHD so my mind will be all over the place,” she says, keen for such conditions to be talked about more widely. “Especially in women, being neurodiverse and having ADHD is dismissed from a young age. That’s what happened to me. For years, I was seen as the distraction or the annoying one. That plays on you as a child.”

The change came at Mountview where the teachers recognised her condition within the first year and insisted she be diagnosed. “It was so reassuring,” she says. “As soon as I got the diagnosis it was like everything made sense. Now it’s a massive part of me, my personality and my life because so much of the way I act, the way I am with people and my relationships is different because of how my brain works. I can understand myself more. My emotions were not regulated and I wasn’t understanding why.”

She has been lucky to be part of companies, including those for The Tempest and Dracula, that placed a premium on diversity. “I wasn’t the only neurodivergent on Dracula and I felt like it was super-inclusive,” she says about Sally Cookson’s production of Morna Pearson’s play. “It was an incredible show to be part of and an ideal cast.”

She is proud to have been in productions that have questioned the status quo. “When I knew it was going to be a female and non-binary cast for Dracula, I absolutely wanted to be part of it,” says Faint, whose career was put on hold by Covid after she graduated in 2020. “We were making history by giving non-binary and trans actors a stage and that is so important – especially now. I was honoured to be part of that.”

James V: Katherine, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 5–20 April and touring until 1 June