When I arrive at the coffee shop, Lizzie Annis is already waiting for me. The waitress knows who the actress is (“I come here all the time,” Annis explains) but no one else takes any notice of the arresting young woman in the red dress, sitting in the corner. This, I suspect, will soon change.
We are having coffee across from the Duke of York Theatre, where Annis is currently starring alongside Amy Adams in a revival of Tennessee Williams’ classic play The Glass Menagerie. Despite being at wildly disparate stages in their career, both women are experiencing their West End debut together. “Amy is just so wonderful and I feel so deeply grateful to her; I’ve learned so much from watching her process and she always gives me great pieces of advice,” she says. “The other day she told me to ‘do the show where you’re at’ which is a really deceptively simple piece of guidance. Also, I think she is just having a total ball in London with us! I’m going to really miss her when the run ends.”
Annis plays Laura Wingfield, the young, fragile daughter of Adams’ troubled matriarch Amanda. “It was such an exciting moment to be cast,” she tells me, of snaring the role just months after graduating from drama school. “I wanted this part with my whole heart.” There is an earnestness to Annis that is in no way affected. You really do believe she wanted to play Laura with her whole heart. She spends several moments explaining her love of Tennessee Williams, nurtured during both her English literature degree at Bristol University and studying at the Oxford School of Drama. She coos over lines, not even her own, learnt over months of the play’s run. “There are phrases in this play that are just stunning. I mean where do you even start with language like that?” she asks, before self-consciously smiling; “God I’m being such a nerd aren’t I?”
She is equally as passionate about Laura, discussing how the role was written as a tribute to Williams’ sister Rose, whose mental illness was tragically mistreated, and whose lobotomy occurred in 1943, against Williams’ wishes, just two years before The Glass Menagerie. “Rose was effectively silenced when that happened to her, and this play gives her her voice back,” Annis says. “I view it as an active kind of atonement and expiation for Williams as a writer.” In his notes to the play, the playwright described Laura as “like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf”. Annis has a similar take. “That menagerie is a way of giving the inner world of Laura – and by extension Rose – a physical manifestation. It also makes her invisible pain tangible for an audience,” she says. “I imagine she is watching us in the stalls some days. Is that a weird thing to say? It’s just I feel like the play, even all these years later, is still for her and every actor who plays Laura still has that responsibility of sorts.”
Her fierce devotion to Laura is perhaps intensified by the fact that she is the first actor with a disability (Annis has cerebral palsy) to play the role. Many critics, in the overwhelming praise she has received thus far, have commented on the extra dimension this adds to the character, and Annis agrees. “I think it is significant. Everything I bring to Laura on this platform is authentic and therefore I hope makes for an authentic storytelling experience,” she says. “I think it’s a beautiful thing to bring all of my experiences to the character and actually embrace my body and have fun with it.”
Annis is exceptionally thoughtful and erudite about her disability. “Performance has always been a means of self-expression that is a place where I suppose I can live out a lot of different versions of myself and explore parts of myself that I don’t feel as liberated to do so within my everyday life,” she says, explaining that for years she felt compelled to hold herself back, to be a version of herself more accepted by others. In a way, she says, it was her first role. “I studied everyone else and tried to make myself more palatable. Isn’t that an awful thing to say? It’s taken me a long time to unpack the layers of that – the kind of covert ableism, within the fabric of society today.”
The landscape is, thankfully, changing for disabled actors. “You see us in so many more shows and films and plays,” she says. “It makes you realise how unrealistic and unrepresentative previous works that excluded us are.” She herself now views her disability as a superpower. “You come to learn that those things that make you different are actually the things that will help you succeed in doing what you love.”
This certainly seems to be the case. Annis will next be seen as magical Zacaré in Netflix’s fantasy behemoth The Witcher: Blood Origin, alongside Michelle Yeoh, Lenny Henry and Dylan Moran. “I love fantasy and making something on that scale was just a ridiculous amount of fun,” she says. “I also got to horse-ride in it, which is one of my non-acting pastimes!” She also has a number of projects in the works, as both writer and actress; from a film inspired by the true story of Abbey Curran, the first disabled woman to compete in the Miss USA pageant, to an adaptation of her own one-woman play, Trouble – which lit up the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe.
But until then, after Menagerie ends, Annis is off on a much-deserved holiday. “I just really want to be on a lilo in a pool,” she tells me, smiling, as we leave the coffee shop. The waitress waves goodbye to her as we go, and once again, I wonder how long this rising star’s anonymity will last.
See Annis in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ at the Duke of York’s Theatre, until 27 August.
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