Meet Monica Dolan — TV’s secret weapon and star of the Post Office drama

No one could reasonably accuse television drama of lacking grieving mothers. Most recently, Joanna Scanlan played one in Channel 4’s The Light in the Hall and Vicky McClure another in ITV’s Without Sin. Nor are gangster matriarchs a TV rarity. Consider Helen McCrory’s Aunt Polly in the BBC’s Peaky Blinders or Michelle Fairley’s Marian Wallace in Gangs of London on Sky Atlantic. Now, in the imminent second season of James Graham’s award-winning community-in-crisis serial Sherwood, Monica Dolan plays a gangster mum whose son has been shot dead. But I promise you won’t have seen anything like it.
Dolan is one of our most versatile actors. She has said, “If I’ve done one role, then I’ll want to do something very different”, which can make her difficult to place. Like Maggie Smith and Imelda Staunton, she started out in theatre before moving into television and film. She may be best known for her comedy because of W1A, the BBC sitcom about itself, in which she played the gloomy senior comms officer Tracey Pritchard (catchphrase: “I’m not being negative, but …”). Equally, however, Dolan won a Bafta for her chilling turn as the killer-pervert Rosemary West in Appropriate Adult in 2011. The fact is the 55-year-old actress can play pretty much everything, including real people, as demonstrated in her portrayal of the wrongly convicted sub-postmistress Jo Hamilton in this year’s legally and politically game-changing Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
In Sherwood, Dolan is extraordinary as Ann Branson, one the new characters Graham has tipped into the murky waters of post-coal Nottinghamshire. In her first speaking scene Ann pays a visit to the ne’er-do-well Sparrow family, familiar to viewers of season one, planning to enlist their help in avenging her loss. After a flash of anger at the family’s resistance to her demands she bizarrely switches tack to ask Mother Sparrow what veg she is planning with the roast she is cooking. Dolan manages to imbue the line “Parsnips, lovely, how will you do them? Roast with a bit of honey?” with menace, grievance, over-familiarity and condescension all at once. And a grim scene turns funny.
“I mean, a lot of comedy is to do with unpredictability, isn’t it? And I think Ann enjoys the fact that she’s unpredictable. She likes making people unsure where they stand,” Dolan says. “When I looked at that line, I thought, ‘I’m not really sure what this is. How do I do this bit?’ So I thought I’d just learn it and turn up. And then we did the screening and people laughed and I still thought, ‘I don’t really know why that’s funny.’”
“I really, really enjoyed playing Ann,” she says. “It’s very rare to play somebody with total self-confidence. And that was absolutely joyous. Loved it.”
Of West she once said it was useful to regard morality as an aspect of character. Is Ann amoral? “I think she’s got a very particular moral code of her own, certainly a very strong, very powerful sense of the law and order that her family and the drugs cartels need to create and maintain because at a certain time the police lost control of it all and the cartels were in charge. When there isn’t any other kind of law and order, it’s like Macbeth:power is up for grabs.”
She played Lady Macbeth 20 years ago for Max Stafford-Clark at the Arcola in east London. One reviewer wrote that her sleep-walking scene was so unsettling it could give audiences “callow nightmares”. Yet Dolan came from a family of scientists. Her father and brother were engineers, her mother a biochemist and her late sister a mathematician (another studied English at university). She is not ashamed to say her approach to character is almost scientifically clinical.
“I think the least useful thing you can bring in is any sense of your own morality or any sense of judgment. You set yourself free if you think to yourself this is just what they do. If you looked at your character as an animal, it might be more helpful because we see animals as amoral. We just look at them in terms of, ‘Oh, that one does this and that does that.’”
Another of her approaches is through accent. To play Hamilton in Mr Bates she not only met the wronged woman, but asked her to make a short recording of her life up to the point the drama began. “At one point she was saying, ‘I’ve written some of it and I’m going to read it’, and I said, ‘Oh no, don’t do that. I need to hear your rhythms and how you speak.’” As well as Tracey Pritchard’s Welsh, Dolan mastered Hartlepool speech for The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe (another real life story — she played the fraudster John Darwin’s wife) and for My Name is Leon the foster carer Maureen’s Brummie.
I wonder whether being born in Middlesbrough, but to Irish parents, then moving as a child to Woking in Surrey left her with a gift for regional mimicry. “Somewhere in me,” she concedes. “I know that there are different ways to speak and different sounds available and that they’re enjoyable physically to do.It’s another aspect of character. I mean, people’s roots and where they come from are so much part of them.”
Her own path was to move away from her family’s academic roots. As a 14-year-old she returned home from her first session at the local youth drama group and told her mother, “I’ve found my people.” To keep her parents happy, she applied for university, but then secretly withdrew her application. She took a job at an insurance company, then moved to a job centre, but some friends were at a technical college studying drama and she begged to join their theatre outings and talks. “I was a total anorak.”
When she told her parents she wanted to be an actress they panicked a bit. “Certainly I remember my dad saying, ‘We don’t know anything about that.’” But he drove her to her drama school audition at the Redgrave Theatre in Bristol and she made it to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
I need to ask about Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologue, which she recorded for the BBC at the start of lockdown. In The Shrine she was the newly bereaved Lorna, whose husband died in a motorbike accident. The day Dolan began rehearsing with friends on Zoom, she was told her brother had died from Covid. She says the group knew, but with wartime spirit just carried on.
“Learning lines is a really technical thing so actually a very brilliant thing to do when you just want … It’s quite meditative. It can be, you know.”
Did she tell the play’s director, Nicholas Hytner, about her loss? “I rang him and just said, you know, this happened, my brother has died of Covid. I said, ‘I just want you to know in case at any point I go a bit funny.’ And what was so great was that he just listened and said, ‘OK, thank you.’ He took the information and then neither of us mentioned it again, but I’m 100 per cent sure that if I had needed to mention it again, he would have been very kind about it.”
So, despite the piece’s subject matter, she did not wobble because she was in good hands?“I probably had lots of wobbles during it, but, you know, who didn’t at that time?”
I once interviewed Juliet Stevenson, famous for her Niagran tears as the bereaved girlfriend in the movie Truly Madly Deeply. She told me she was ruthless about using memories of personal anguish in a performance. “I get that. I get that,” Dolan says. “I’d probably call it clinical, but I certainly get that.”
In a revealing newspaper Q&A this year, Dolan said her greatest disappointment was not marrying the person she had wanted to, but she now thought it was probably a good thing. She agrees with me her career probably would have been affected by marriage, but whether she would have worked more or less she cannot tell. If she does marry, a friend has promised to do a cage dance at the wedding. “So I see that as a challenge and I’ll probably try and do it.”
In reply to what made her unhappy, she said “feeling overlooked”.
“I don’t like being underestimated either,” she warns.
It is an odd thing to be said by an actress who has worked so much and in such a variety of genres, won a Bafta and an Olivier, for the stage version of All About Eve five years ago, and brought her own play, The B*easts,to Edinburgh seven years ago. But I know I am not alone in regarding Dolan as a national treasure who has not quite yet been recognised as such. “Oh, well, that’s nice,” she replies when I tell her. She says it benignly, but I am glad it is Dolan speaking and not terrifying Ann Branson.
The second series of Sherwood is coming soon to BBC1 and iPlayer
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