By james art 
Brogan Gilbert’s days as Maude are numbered. With Halloween upon us, this is the psycho-horror thriller St. Maude is almost ready at Live Theater and Brogan can stop being nervous.
She is nervous! What about the audience?
But the leading lady in this faithfully tense, edge-of-the-seat ghost film adaptation seems to have channeled her opening-night stage fright.
“I have terrible stage nerves,” she confides before an evening performance.
“I’m terrible before a show. I look so weird because I’m just going up and down, up and down. I’m just walking.
“In a way, I think it’s a blessing to play a nervous character on stage because I’m nervous when I first go on.”
Having watched the show, I can say that her entrance is spectacular, even slightly unnerving. Dressed in a nurse’s outfit and with her naturally sparkling hair partially tamed, she looks demure… but there’s something about her.
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Mod is a puzzle, hard to read.
In person, Brogan is friendly, funny and, she admits, somewhat “baby-brained” as she is mother to 10-month-old Flora.
Maude and Flora together keep her on her toes and a little crazy at the same time.
Still on the subject of nerves, she says that if she wasn’t nervous before a show, then she really would be. “It sounds weird, but I feel like nervousness is a good energy that you can use.
“That means you’re active right now, too. Not being nervous would look like not being focused.”
Saint Maud has been a pleasant experience, she insists.
The play, directed by Jack McNamara, who also shares writing credit with Jessica Andrews, gave her her first major lead role and some good reviews.
The Guardian The critic hinted at her “outstanding performance as a troubled nurse who cares for a terminally ill dancer” and said Brogan deserved to be the “main star” as Morfid Clarke, who plays Maud in the film.
That, says the 26-year-old sweetly, was “unbelievably nice.”
Brogan lives with her partner and Flora in Wallsend, where she grew up. Both sets of parents are close—a willing and necessary support network—and her own must be especially thrilled by her success.
It was Doctor Who that’s what got her into it, it turns out. Doctor Who and her mother.
“I guess it was a silly start, but I just wanted to be involved Doctor Who (Christopher Eccleston is her favourite, in case you were wondering). I thought, how do I do this? My school wasn’t big on drama, so my mum was researching youth theater and came up with this one here at Live.
“It was free, it still is, and it’s brilliant. I started when I was about 13 and was at it for a few years.
So she entered Your Aunt Fannythe female comedy troupe. There was a call for members within Live Youth Theatre, she auditioned and got a part.
“We did a few different gigs and went to the Edinburgh Fringe when I was 17.”
She was, she recalls, “pretty good,” so when some of the other girls, who were 18, went drinking after the show, Brogan, being underage, went home.
This was not her first attempt at performing outside Tyneside. At 15, when she was studying for her GCSEs, she saw a national open call from Shakespeare’s Globe for people to join the Globe Young Players in London.
“I asked my parents if I could audition and bless them, they did. I went to an audition and did a monologue from Doctor Who (of course!).
“I got a flashback and thought it was weird, a coincidence. Then I auditioned again and got called back. Then I got a role and it was mind-blowing.”
The willing Time Lord took part The dissatisfied onean early drama of Jacob by John Marston. She remembers taking the night bus home on Sundays and leaving for school a few hours later.
She went back to do Dido, Queen of Carthage – 16th Tragedy of the Century by Christopher Marlowe (and possibly Thomas Nash) – and for the third time he was in a Jubilee event (which he can’t remember) at Southwark Cathedral.
Prince Philip attended, as did actress Zoe Wanamaker and other luminaries.
“We were all given a Shakespeare sonnet to learn. I was horrified. When the audience came in, the idea was that we got to sit next to someone and perform a sonnet really intimately.
“But I was so shy that I avoided people. I know people who sat next to a famous person, but they were so good at their performance and I just couldn’t. But it was brilliant.”
She believes that nerves got in the way when she started auditioning for the big theater schools in London. Friends went to university. Brogan stayed home and applied again and again.
“I wasn’t very good at the audition and I’m not a very good singer. It’s annoying that you had to sing in the audition, even if it wasn’t musical theater.
“That would be my downfall, because you’d have to do it a cappella, without music, and I’d never know what to do with my body while I’m singing. It was terrible. If I had to sing the song before the monologue, it was game over. I think I wasn’t very confident.”
It costs her a lot of money, a fact that doesn’t seem to have registered in some of these authentic institutions in the metropolis. One, she recalls, after spending money on train and tube tickets and paying around £60 just to audition (can you believe it?), wrote that they were still not sure if she would come back and do it again. She hasn’t been offered a place yet.
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She ended up staying in the North East, “doing everything really – student films and unpaid work and as an ‘extra'”.
But she was signed by North East agent Janet Plater, who saw her at a youth theater event at the Customs House in South Shields. And it was Janet who asked if she was interested in auditioning for St. Maude.
She had already noticed the play in the new Live Theater brochure and wanted to see it.
But as for being in it…
“Flora was six months old. There was supposed to be a week of research and development (research and development) in London and then four weeks of rehearsals and four weeks of performances.
“So I was like…yeah! As an actor you get so used to rejection. I thought, I’m not going to get it anyway.
“I learned a monologue from an early version of the play and auditioned. It was a pleasant mood. You can usually tell when it’s a definite no. Then they called me back and I read with some of the other actors who were auditioning for the other roles, and I was offered the part pretty quickly.”
The whole family went to London and everything went well.
Brogan interacted with her fellow cast members Dani Arlington (who plays ex-dancer Amanda) and Nashla Kaplan (Carol) and felt she benefited from their greater experience.
“You always hope they’ll be normal and nice. And they are. They’re both great.”
But there was one thing she had to ask Danny at lunch on the first day, and it had to do with the weather in New York when suddenly, as an understudy, she had to go on stage in Prima faciean extremely demanding one-woman show.
Jody Comer, who excelled in the piece, was overcome by the fumes from the wildfires that rose over the town.
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Brogan says: “I asked her, ‘Surely you can’t feel stressed now because you’re at peak stress?'” That must have been the most stressful thing in theater… I just don’t think I could have done it.
“Being an understudy, you get into the habit of not introducing yourself, so when it’s just, ‘Go and change!’ Well, I would have been beside myself, but she did it so brilliantly and they loved her.
“Danny told me, ‘It doesn’t work like that. I’m still nervous.
What’s next for Brogan Gilbert then, at least until Doctor Who is calling?
Family considerations aside, she says she always has some youth drama up her sleeve. And then there’s your Aunt Fanny, long outgrown the Live Youth Theater to become an independent organisation.
“We’re doing a Christmas show at The Stand. It’s like a parody of those soap opera Christmas specials and it’s called You’re not me, mom.
“Actually, Fanny has a lot of projects coming up next year, so it’s probably going to be a Fanny-centric year.”
This sets off a burst of laughter that coming from Maud would be deeply disturbing, but coming from Brogan is wonderfully infectious.
Now, with a few hours to spare before the evening performance, she sets out to get her nerves under control with a little crochet before she starts walking.
Saint Maud is on until Saturday, November 2. Tickets from Live Theater box office.