In the transcendent
Louisa Harland plays Louisa May Alcott in a drama about a 19th-century American spiritual movement
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- Gareth McLean
Transcendental Wild Oats is on Saturday at 3pm on Radio 4. Add it to your collection
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Among Louisa Harland’s many talents, albeit not showcased in Channel 4’s Derry Girls or in BBC1’s upcoming adaptation of Marian Keyes’s The Walsh Sisters, is that she can think and breathe in cockney. “I’ve been doing accents since I was a child and a role with an accent is a dream role for me,” she says, explaining that the modulation and indeed subsuming of her own Dublin tones is just part of perfecting an accent. “How you breathe or laugh as a character with an accent is maybe not the same as how I would myself.
“When I did Renegade Nell [Sally Wainwright’s period romp about a highwaywoman], I had to do old-school cockney, so I would try and think in the accent as opposed to just sending out the right sounds, because then I feel that it’s more in my body.”
Harland says she loves the transformative nature of doing an accent and admits that she’d love to take on an American one in a long-running US series. “Playing anything far away from myself is my dream. I love doing animation voiceovers, too, and I’d love to do more. A Bojack Horseman or something like it would be ideal.”
We’re discussing accents on account of Harland’s polished American in Radio 4’s new drama Transcendental Wild Oats, in which she plays its author and narrator, Louisa May Alcott.
I try to think in the accent, not just send out the right sounds
First published two years after Little Women, in 1873, Transcendental Wild Oatsis an account of the Alcott family’s disastrous involvement with the Transcendentalist movement in New England in the 1840s.
Under the influence of dour Englishman Charles Lane, her idealistic father moved the family to a commune where veganism, celibacy and general parsimony were the order of the day. At Fruitlands, they eschewed artificial light and heat, personal property was abolished and a “consociate” family was created out of the farm’s 14 residents, replacing the pre-existing family units. The utopia lasted all of seven months.
In the original version of the story, Alcott bestowed pseudonyms on her characters – her father became Abel Lamb, Lane Timon Lion – but this adaptation, which combines the original short story with historical records including letters and diaries of the Fruitlands family, tears away that thin veil and unabashedly names and shames.
For a meditation on the follies of arrogant and ignorant men and the price that women and children pay for those follies, the adaptation is a bit of a romp. If comedy can be called tragedy with distance, in Transcendental Wild Oats tragedy keeps its distance – just. Harland says the decision to take the part was a “no-brainer”.
Louisa May Alcott. Getty
“I like to do anything Radio 4,” she says, having previously narrated a Book at Bedtime. “I heard this team were great – and they absolutely were – and it was such a brilliant cast.” That great team includes directors Gordon Kennedy and Edward Rowett, and actors Alistair Petrie, Rebekah Staton and Mathew Baynton.
Transcendental Wild Oats is not the only period drama with which Harland is currently associated. There is the small matter of the movie Hamnet, in which she plays, in flashback, the mother of Agnes. How was that? “I’d read the book, so I was very excited to read the script, and I was just delighted to be on set for a week, because everything – the cinematography, the costumes, the performances… It was the most elevated filming experience I’ve ever been a part of.”
Liz Lewin, who helped develop and executive produce Harland’s breakout series Derry Girls with writer Lisa McGee, says that Harland brought “a precision” to playing odd Orla, a part that could have been played broad. It’s that precision that marks the actor out as what Lewin describes as “terrifically talented”. Where does that precision, that talent, come from?
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“I’ve been doing poetry competitions since I was very young, pantos in church halls and stuff like that. It’s always been all-consuming for me,” she says. “I have such a want to be doing this and I feel lucky that I’m doing it. I take it very seriously, I suppose. I don’t think I ever saw it as a career, though, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a moment of thinking ‘Oh, I’m good at this.’ I just know that I love it.”
Authors
Gareth McLean
Gareth McLean has been writing about television for nearly 30 years. As a critic, he's reviewed thousands of programmes. As a feature writer, he's interviewed hundreds of people, from Liza Minnelli to Jimmy Savile. He has also written for TV.
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