The first public performance of Sebastian Faulk’s BIRDSONG was on the 18 September 2010 at London’s Comedy Theatre. Directed by Sir Trevor Nunn, the WWI love story featured Ben Barnes and Genevieve O’Reilly, who I drew on the day and meet at the stage door where they graphed it, commemorating the World Premiere.
Irish-born, Australian-raised, London-based actress Genevieve O’Reilly is currently playing a Western photojournalist in Abi Morgan’s tense and gripping play Splendour at the Donmar Warehouse. She is waiting in a room to take the photo of a dictator in a fictional country with his wife, her best friend and an interpreter. All four women harbour secrets. All four are in danger and the dictator is late…very late.
I met Genevieve in late 2010 at the then Comedy Theatre, (now Harold Pinter) when she was in Sebastian Faulk’s stage version of his novel Birdsong with Ben Barnes. They both signed sketches for me. When I met her a couple of weeks ago at the Donmar to get this drawing graphed, she remembered me and said she still has the copy of the Birdsong one I gave both her and Ben.
Irish-Australian actress Genevieve O’Reilly played the love interest opposite Ben Barnes in Trevor Nunn‘s stage version of Sebastian Faulk’s harrowing WWI novel Birdsong at London’s Comedy Theatre at the end of 2010
It follows the fortunes of Stephen Wraysford who is sent to Northern France to stay with a factory owner and has an affair with the owner’s wife Isabelle. Six years later he returns to fight in the trenches in the same fields where he fell in love.
In an Evening Standard interview Ben commented on the ‘velvety texture’ to Genevieve’s voice, which is Irish overlaid with a hint of Adelaide, where she grew up from the age of ten.
She had worked with Trevor before on the acclaimed 2005 production of Richard II playing the Queen to Kevin Spacey‘s Richard. Film Fans will probably best remember he as Dash MacKenzie in Avatar or Mon Mothma in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
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