Banished, the new BBC Two penal colony drama which includes Orla Brady among its cast, begins on Thursday March 5 at 9:00pm. Here Brady discusses her character, Anne Meredith.
Written and devised by Jimmy McGovern (Cracker), Banished tells the story of the establishment of the first penal colony in Australia in 1788 and Brady is joined in the cast by MyAnna Buring, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Russell Tovey, Joanna Vanderham and fellow Irish actors Ned Dennehy and Genevieve O'Reilly.
When you read the scripts for Banished what was your response?
Orla Brady: It felt novelistic. With each character I came across, I wanted to come back to their story. I had no favourites and was intrigued to follow each story again.
Who is Anne Meredith?
She is described in the script as mysterious, enigmatic. When you play a part you would never describe yourself in those terms because your motives are clear to you. But I accept that Anne is a character who is apart from the others.
She is not Christian, in spite of Christianity being a given in the colony at that time. Anne has a different way of seeing. Her beliefs are akin to what we would now call Pantheist, or Animist - in the sense of everything having a soul.
Anne believes that she speaks to the dead and that she is a conduit that can bring messages from the dead and even the unborn. Standing outside the moral code of her time, she is not a character which the others find easy to understand, hence there is suspicion and fear of her, especially from the vicar.
Everyone in the colony is there to work, what is Anne's job?
Anne and Kitty (Vanderham) are washerwomen and cooks, so we do women's work in a tough environment. Washing, of course, was terribly, terribly harsh because you barely had warm water. Cooking just meant rustling up endless pancakes. I could make you one now if you wanted, in a minute. It's basically maize meal with weevils in there to provide protein!
What was the highlight of your time in Australia?
There are so many... like paddle-boarding in the harbour before work. But I have to go with a volleyball game on the beach. It was Establishment versus Convicts. So soldiers, housekeeper, Governor, made up one volleyball team and all the convicts the other. Obviously the convicts won - we're tougher!
Brady's new film, the Mary McGuckian-directed Eileen Gray biopic The Price of Desire, is the Opening Gala film at this year's Jameson Dublin International Film Festival on Thursday March 19. For more, visit: www.jdiff.com.
