National Theatre

"I love it when you get so into a book that you want to read it standing up, walking along, at the bus stop, wherever you are."

The first book I ever read...

I read a lot as a child so it's very hard to pick one. When I was about thirteen I read a batch of William Golding back-to-back and I remember that had a real impact, particularly The Inheritors and Pincher Martin. He's not very fashionable nowadays, but at the time I was astonished by these sustained leaps of imagination. The Inheritors is set amongst a Neanderthal tribe and they're not human beings. It sounds very sci-fi but it becomes an extended metaphor about Christianity and the dark side of human nature. It's one of the most devastating things I've read. It really opened my mind to possibilities of being transported.

My favourite book...

There are so many to choose from! If you choose one you're aware of all the ones you're not choosing. They change according to how old you are, how recently you read something, the frame of mind you're in. There's a book I loved as a teenager, Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann, and I read it and read it. But now I might find it quite sentimental. Nowadays, favourites would have to include Gulliver's Travels. I remember reading it at university and finding it particularly delightful and funny and provocative. I love it when you have a book and there's that bittersweet feeling, you mourn it when you finish it. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Midnight's Children I had to read at university in five days because I had to write an essay on it. I had to force-feed it on a daily basis. It was so in intensive, the effect of it, that I was in floods of tears because I'd experienced it in real time. That's really stayed with me. And I tend to reread poetry. I like Larkin's collected poems. Studying English propelled me into reading books of a certain era that I wouldn't necessarily have gone to. I think there was probably a bit of an effect that afterwards I just wanted to read anything I didn't have to. Ultimately studying literature frees you up in your adult reading to a lot of the classics. They're in the can, so your list of things to read can be quite free. Also being able to have a perspective as you read can only be a good thing.

The classic I've never read...

I do have gaps. For some reason I've never got round to reading Pride and Prejudice. It always tops the list of the most popular books. I've never read Joyce's big ones, Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake. My gaps in reading are more European works. Before ...some trace of her, I'd never read Dostoevsky. I kept meaning to. Perhaps I'll read Crime and Punishment after this. I've never read War and Peace. Don Quixote... everyone says that's one of those that's up there that no one ever reads. I‘ve never read any Henry James or Flaubert... Dickens is another big one.  I think reading those books that are so big requires a certain mental stamina and you need to know that you've got a long time ahead of you. I can't really read when I'm working on a play. I can't do anything that's different to that. So making the time is difficult, but when you do, the reward is so fantastic.

What I'm reading at the moment...

The last thing I read was while I was rehearsing The City, Martin Crimp lent me a book by Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese writer, which very much informed that play. It takes the form of diary entries and contains a lot of the themes connected with the play. It's a really heartbreaking, astonishing piece of work. It's about wanting to be a writer and failure of imagination, which is what the play is very much about. A really stimulating book. I tend to read in bursts between jobs; a range of things, hopping between fiction, occasionally memoirs and poetry.

On Sense and Sensibility...

I'd read it, then I reread it a couple of times when we were doing it. I was familiar with it. I read it when I was quite juvenile, so I probably sympathised more with Marianne then, and now more with Elinor. Austen radiates intelligence. She's very funny, she's a great satirist. Her structure is fantastic, and she knows how to draw in the reader and how to get you rooting for these characters. She's an absolute master and very rewarding to read. In Sense and Sensibility we wanted to make it feel that they were a real family, real sisters and not like we were in a ‘costume drama'. It's hard because the language is going to be more formal and also your costumes and etiquette, but you have to fight to work out what the story is beneath that. Behind closed doors they're just like us.

On Dostoevsky and The Idiot...

I was totally drawn in by it. It's in four parts. The first part is almost structured like a thriller, then it changes very much after that, and there are a lot of bits which feel they're going off on a tangent. He explores extraordinary ideas, but the plot can get put to one side and what you realise is that he's writing for a serial publication: it was very bound by economic deadlines and how many words he had to write. I think his publisher had lowered the rate he was paid, which Dostoevsky suspected was to try and make him write a longer novel. The time pressure was such that he wrote by dictation, so you get a sense of these very long, sometimes ranging passages which have a great energy, spontaneity, effervescence and momentum, but can feel at times that they inhabit a different world of writing to the more structured sections. He said that he felt he would have been a better writer if he'd had more money, like Tolstoy and Turgenev, who had estates and inheritances which gave them the time to draft and redraft and make everything exquisite, whereas Dostoevsky was writing on the hoof. He knew where he was going to end up, but a lot of it was "But I can't go and alter part one because it's in the can already; people have read it already." And he always wrote to deadline and gave it in having just finished it. Saying all that, I think I was really struck by his real psychological insight. There are portraits of characters that are rooted in heartbreaking psychological truth, and he's got a great facility for dialogue. Huge extended conversations. He gets inside all different sorts of people's heads. He touches very different thought processes. It's really exhilarating. All the big ideas are there: love, death, faith, money. All the major things that we grapple with are explored, and it goes into all sorts of territories, but the end is really devastating.

From The Idiot to ...some trace of her

It's a vast novel in terms of the range of characters and the voices we hear through the novel, but what Katie Mitchell's done very carefully is strim away. You couldn't present the whole thing; it would be hours and hours long. We're taking an essential strand through it and we're focusing on the quartet at the centre. Katie coined it very well when she said it's like we're doing a poem in response to it. Video, sound... I can't really say what it's going to be yet. It's a version drawn from the novel, rather than trying to retell the story of The Idiot on stage. It's going to be far more a poetic response. Myshkin (Ben Whishaw's character) at one point is searching for Nastasya (my character) and the thoughts in his head say "At least let me find some trace of her".

My favourite place to read...

I have this ideal memory in my head of when I was little and used to lie on this faded orange cushion from the sofa out in the garden and read Roald Dahl and Tintin and things like that. It was my idea of absolute bliss, so I'm always trying to recreate that escape. But I love it when you get so into a book that you want to read it standing up, walking along, at the bus stop, wherever you are. That's the best feeling.

Hattie appears in ...some trace of her in the Cottesloe until 21 October.

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