Marey, who cleans airports and sings with a band

Preview Online

Marey is the only one of the seven characters to have been born and bred in Camden: a working-class Londoner with a dead-end job cleaning Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Four, but whose main source of pleasure is singing with a band in a pub.

Marey meets Danny when he turns up at Terminal Four with a spare ticket to Jamaica (his former other half’s honeymoon treat) and offers it to her. But he’s too drunk to be allowed on the plane, so they end up drinking some more and going to bed together. It doesn’t last. Nor does Marey’s fling with Cameron or her liaison with Liam. But she probably comes out of it all stronger than most of them because she’s more grounded.

Marey is played by Kathy Burke, who won Best Actress at Cannes in 1998 for her role as the abused wife in Gary Oldman’s Nil by Mouth, but is best known to British audiences as Perry, sidekick of hormonal adolescent Kevin in the TV show Harry Enfield and Chums, which is shortly to be turned into a feature film. Burke was also seen last year as Mary Tudor in the historical drama Elizabeth and as Maggie in Dancing at Lughnasa.

“I can relate to Marey quite a lot,” admits Burke. “All that being self-conscious and not being happy about her weight and her looks – knowing she’s not a pretty girl and that she has to rely on her personality and being funny.

“I’ve known David [Kane, the writer/director] for about eight years. I’d seen a film that he’d done for ‘Screen Two’ called Shadow of the Earth, which I’d loved. I was just a fan, really, and if he had plays on, I’d go and see them. He became a friend and, a couple of years ago, he said he wanted to write something set around Camden. “David was one of the first people I phoned up when I got that award at Cannes, because I wondered if it would help him finance the film.”