Sheila Atim: Meet C&TH’s Sept/Oct Cover Star

Matt Wolf meets a musical theatre actress catapulted to Olivier Award-winning success by her tangible realness and soulful, heart-rending voice

Sheila Atim Wows In The West End – Interview

Sheila Atim chooses her roles wisely and well. At 34, the former model who studied environmental science at King’s College London, has two Olivier Awards and an MBE to her name. She has also come to prominence on screen alongside the likes of Viola Davis in The Woman King and Halle Berry in the Oscar-winning actress’s directorial debut, Bruised.

This month, she’ll be up close and personal at Chelsea Arts Festival as the Women’s Prize for Fiction celebrates its 30th birthday. Atim will be on hand as one of a handful of readers, lending star wattage to a gala night that is sure to be enlivened by her innate elegance and style.

The Ugandan-British actress won her first Olivier in 2018 for her supporting role as Marianne Laine in Girl from the North Country, Conor McPherson’s refashioning of the Bob Dylan songbook. She stepped up to the same podium to receive her second Olivier in 2022 for her part in the West End revival of the metaphysically minded two-hander Constellations by Nick Payne. Atim’s character in this production was also called Marianne.

‘I’m waiting for another Marianne,’ Atim, an open and easy conversationalist, says with a smile. We’re chatting over tea one blissfully warm August afternoon, the two of us ensconced outside a café in Islington, an easy commute from her east London home. Dressed simply but stylishly in a sleeveless top and billowy Michael Kors trousers, her hair cut the shortest she’s ‘ever had it’, she draws the attention of passersby as she elaborates on why she has recently undertaken fewer stage roles than might be expected from someone of her stature. ‘It’s been a combination of timing and the right thing coming in.’

A warm presence with a firm sense of both herself and her career, Atim is the first to marvel at a career trajectory that included a stint as a model in her teens before pursuing biomedical work at university while singing the likes of Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan in and around campus. (The music, she says, helped pay some rent, ‘which was wonderful’.) The biomedicine might seem very much like a red herring, but Atim reflects on her time at King’s College as a chance to pursue a subject she enjoyed. ‘The science part of my life always finds its way back,’ she says, ‘but even before I studied biomedicine, I knew I was going to be an artist by profession.’ University gave her time to think and hone her craft while broadening her education. Within three weeks of finals, she was rehearsing at Shakespeare’s Globe.

It was here, in 2013, that I first came across Atim in The Lightning Child – an adaptation of ancient Greek tragedy The Bacchae which also happened to be the first musical performed at the Globe. She went on to intrigue audiences as the commanding, non-speaking presence – a shape-shifting emblem perhaps of Africa itself – in the National Theatre’s 2016 revival of the little-seen Lorraine Hansberry play, Les Blancs.

But it was the Depression-era Girl from the North Country that was transformative – and not just, she says, because it allowed her to bring a wounding, sad-eyed quality to canonical entries from the Dylan songbook. ‘Conor [McPherson] is very organic in his process and has a very light touch, which is fascinating considering he was both the writer and director.

‘The unusualness of the project required you to make sure all your chops were dialled up to ten,’ she adds of the show, which had a fourth run in London this summer (this time without Atim). ‘It was intriguing in both its tone and style, and had real rigour.’ So much so that it has spoiled Atim for the musical theatre conveyor belt that can snare some performers.

Blazer, shirt, tie, skirt and boots all by Vivienne Westwood

The British composer and arranger Simon Hale, who won a Tony Award for his orchestrations for Girl from the North Country on Broadway, speaks eloquently about what Atim brought to the show in its world premiere in London. ‘Sheila has got an utterly soulful, honest, communicative sound – never contrived or overthought.’ At the 2018 Olivier Awards, she performed live her standout number from the production, Tight Connection to My Heart, which Hale remembers vividly. ‘There was Sheila, with the company and a four-piece acoustic band, with no production around her. When she sang, it was pure, honest theatre and people responded beyond viscerally. She’s got a realness that I think is very special, and soon after, she was holding an Olivier.’

The hit show Constellations followed, exciting audiences with four separate casts that allowed for numerous perspectives in keeping with a prismatic 70-minute single act that itself trafficked in theories of the multiverse. ‘The very nature of the play’s parallel universes meant that we could have multiple versions of the play, and it still worked,’ Atim says of the experience, which on her nights off also allowed her to see two other performers, Zoë Wanamaker included, playing her role.

What’s Next?

Atim’s gathering prominence has allowed her to shift between art forms. She spent six months on the South African set of The Woman King and travelled to the American south to play the absent mother of the central character, Cora, in Barry Jenkins’ acclaimed TV adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. At present, she’s working on a short film of her own that she hopes to direct. Her deliberately individual career path has been encouraged all the while by her mother, who brought the infant Atim to the UK from Uganda aged five months. ‘My mum has always delighted in my creativity and supported it.’

The opportunity to read at Chelsea Arts Festival for Atim, who recorded the audiobook for Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe, speaks to the appeal of reading books aloud when she’s usually reading scripts. ‘This is a different kind of storytelling.’ She confesses to a stack of unread books at home, thanks in part to the fact she pops into Foyles or Waterstones whenever she is passing. ‘There’s something about the energy you find in a bookshop that beckons you in and invites you to pause. Look at all these worlds you could enter – all this stuff  you could learn.’

Looking ahead, Atim has the luxury that comes with being able to choose. Special warmth is reserved for the Old Vic, where she now sits on the board and is privy to the workings of a major theatre soon to get a new artistic director in Rupert Goold. ‘I want to work, but I’m not very good at working in things I don’t believe in. The price of jumping into something for the wrong reasons is too high.’ Far better, she adds, to ‘believe you have something to offer, and that something worth that belief is going to find you’. In which case, Sheila Atim looks ready to make believers of us all.

Matt Wolf is theatre critic for The International New York Times and The Arts Desk and has spent more than 40 years covering London theatre.

Sheila Atim will read at Women’s Words: From Page to Stage, A 30 Year Celebration of the Women’s Prize For Fiction in partnership with The White Company, at Chelsea Arts Festival on 21 September (chelseaartsfestival.com).