Five-star reviews have greeted the latest production of Romeo And Juliet, starring Hainsworth and Toheeb Jimoh as the star-crossed lovers. The raves are in large part because of Isis’s Juliet – the pulse-thumping love for her Romeo is there, yet she conveys a steely Juliet very much in control of the decisions she is making.
It is a performance partly informed by a disturbing event that happened on the way to her audition for the role.
‘I was groped on the Tube,’ says the actor, mustering as much nonchalance about the outrage as she can when we meet one hot morning a few days after press night.
‘It’s that thing of something weird like that happening to you and then you have to just get on with the rest of your life.
‘I’m in the middle of my day, actually,’ she adds, imagining what she might have said to her attacker. ‘I don’t have time for this!’
So what did you say to him? ‘I told him to f*** off. In the audition, I felt very outside my own body, like I wasn’t really in the room.’
We are sitting in the bar at London’s Almeida theatre where R&J is playing until the end of the month. Without meaning to, the show’s co-star has sat under the poster for the show.
It is a bit like seeing double, except that one version is chatting with suppressed emotion and between sips of iced latte about her ordeal on the Tube.
‘I came out of the audition thinking, “Oh well. That was terrible”,’ says the Edinburgh-born actor, her breezy, care-free self beginning to return. ‘But I think I channelled that rage and emotion into what I was doing. And then I got told a couple of days later that I had got the part, which was so lovely and crazy.’
The ‘rage and emotion’ has stayed in the performance. But Isis also deploys the light comic touch seen in much of the 24-year-old’s previous work, such as the movie Catherine Called Birdy, in which she played the beautiful Aelis in the -directed medieval romp.
‘I’d never been cast as “the pretty girl,”’ says Isis. ‘I was so like, “Oh God, that’s so weird. I’m gonna be pretty!”’
The rocketing career was launched by the unexpected hit Our Ladies Of Perpetual Succour, about girls from a Scottish Catholic school – AKA ‘the Virgin Megastore’ – who escape the control of nuns for a day thanks to a singing competition.
The show transferred to London where Isis was later cast in Bridge Theatre’s acclaimed immersive production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which, like director Rebecca Frecknall’s thriller-paced Romeo And Juliet, was also a radical reworking of .
‘I want my career to be off-beat, slightly strange and different to what’s been done before,’ says Isis. ‘I love, love, love people like and . I just like to be in the realm of differentness.’
Isis is already different. Unlike most of her peers, she never went to drama school. After being swept along by the success of Our Lady… ‘I just got an agent and that is how it ended up’.
Later this year, she will make her National Theatre debut, joining star Harriet Walter in a new version of the Spanish classic The House of Bernarda Alba. Stopping all this to go to drama school seems unthinkable.
‘I don’t think I could do that,’ agrees Isis. Not that she thinks she has nothing to learn.
‘I just love doing the job too much to stop for three years,’ she says.
Isis is now one of our few state-educated rising stars in an industry that seems all too well populated by privately educated actors.
‘All of them are great,’ says Isis. ‘But let’s open the doors a little bit. I mean it’s incredibly hard to get into acting as a working-class person.’
has also been a challenge. ‘I just was really bad at exams. Even if I worked hard,’ she says. ‘I was friends with a lot of very academically clever folks. Really high-achievers.
‘But then when it came to actually doing the tests there was just no way I could do what they did. It made me feel so stupid. It was not a good environment for me, school. They which were the ones that I actually loved and was good at.’
But now she seems unstoppable. A gap of a few months has appeared between the Romeo and Juliet run and the National Theatre job.
Time for another film? ‘I’d love to squeeze in a little something between this ending and the one at the National starting,’ she says. ‘But we’ll see.’
Romeo and Juliet is at the until July 29.
