Nearing the end of a six-week run as lead character in Alice at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, Ruby Bentall is still energetic and animated. Perhaps it’s the apple juice she’s practically downed. She doesn’t drink tea or coffee, and her rock-and-roll method to see her through a non-stop performance is to eat a banana. And maybe do some yoga. Pippa Haywood (Green Wing), Bentall’s onstage mother, often runs classes before they start a show.
Adapted by award-winning Sheffield-export Laura Wade, Alice reinvents Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and turns it into a menacing, industrial vision through which the character journeys whilst struggling with the recent death of her older brother. Onstage for practically the entire performance, twenty-two year old Bentall is impressively relaxed about commanding the Crucible.
“It’s lovely. It’s really great when you’re on the stage, it feels quite warm,” she says, while accepting that it has been a frantic show. “It is quite tiring. Because it’s in sections, suddenly one bit finishes and I think ‘Oh, I don’t want to do the next bit!’ but then you go, ‘No, come on! We have to get through it!’” she laughs. “But most of the time, you look around you and go, ‘I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this, it’s so much fun.’”
After her 2006 stage debut at National Theatre with two plays, DNA and The Miracle,everyone from The Telegraph to The Metro described her as a standout performer with a bright future.
“I sort of thought at the time that I’d peaked, at nineteen,” she admits. “It was really flattering, it was nuts, but you have to take it with a pinch of salt. They were just really good parts, and I think I was right for them, and it all went quite well.”
She remains frank about her attitude towards reviews however. “I shouldn’t read them, but I do. I said to myself I wasn’t going to read the Alice reviews and then my mum rang me up and said, ‘Don’t read The Times, it’s not good.’ So I had to. Quite a few of them said they couldn’t hear me, which was stupid, because I was worrying about not being heard, and when it came to press night I started worrying about other things, but it’s such an easy thing to do – speak louder. Luckily, I read them and from then on I’ve been louder, and I think that’s when The Guardian and the rest came, and they gave us really nice reviews, and didn’t mention it.”
Outside theatre, Bentall admits she’d probably do costume dramas all the time if she could – “I’ve got an old-fashioned face” – and has recently played Mary Bennett in Lost in Austen, a maid in the new cinema adaptation of Robin Hood – “Russell Crowe’s trailer was like a spaceship” – and is perhaps most-well known for playing ‘Minnie’ in popular BBC drama Lark Rise to Candleford. That particular show does, she giggles, give her a particular fanbase. “I get recognised in the streets by little old ladies who love the show. The fame that I’ve got is just the right amount. Recognised by old ladies, that’s all I want.”
Professional acting, plus the fame that can come with it, still appear to be funny things. “I always find it very embarrassing when people ask me what I do. I hate telling them, and sometimes I just lie,” she pauses, “I always feel like an idiot.” Interviews too, can be cringeworthy. “I always think I come off really badly. When you suddenly see what you’ve said you go, ‘Oh, I sound like a twat.’”
Both Bentall’s parents are actors, though none of her three siblings are, and she certainly wasn’t pushed into the industry. “They said, ‘If you have to’, but then once they knew I was definitely determined they completely supported me.”
Coming from acting stock didn’t, however, save her from the hard-slog of the amateur circuit.
“Whilst originally trying to get into drama school I did some TiE [Theatre in Education] stuff. I got this tour of Nottingham – in old people’s homes. Three of us doing Jack and the Beanstalk with a tape recorder. They all hated it! They had their fingers in their ears. One time we got shouted at, ‘Shut up your noisy bastards!’ It was such a rubbish little pantomime, but it was funny.”
And Bentall certainly knows funny. “I can kind of do ‘idiot’” she sighs, “I think I’m actually alright at comedy, which is kind of a shame, because I’m not hugely fond of doing it. I think in some ways comedy all is about trying not to be funny, and because I don’t want to do it, I don’t try that hard. I think just play it as straight as you can, and if it’s funny, it will come across. Don’t play it for laughs, because that’s always going to kill any comedy.
“I don’t know, sometimes I just want to do really serious, gritty drama.” She hesitates. “That sounds so wanky.”
With the show soon to be over, she says she’ll miss Sheffield. She’s been spending her free time in the Botanical Gardens, wandering Eccy Road and checking out the current Alice in Wonderland display at Western Bank Library. It’s the people though, who’ve made the biggest impression.
“Everyone is so friendly! In London nobody talks to each other, and suddenly here people are friendly to you in shops, and I think, ‘What? What do you want?’” But she is excited about moving on, with the fourth series of Lark Rise to commence filming in the autumn and after that, she doesn’t really know what’s next. “But I love that. I like the fact I have no idea where I’ll be in a year, and that’s kind of an amazing feeling.”
If anything seems certain, it’s that wherever Bentall is next, she won’t be able to lie about what she does for much longer.
Alice runs at The Crucible until Saturday 24 July: www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk