Theatre

Eileen Atkins is not quite so famous as our other theatrical dames, but she’s rightly riding high on her performance as Miss Deborah in the BBC’s hugely enjoyable ‘Cranford’, the village’s moral arbiter on such tricky questions as how to eat an orange or whether women can walk behind a funeral carriage. Atkins is invariably fascinating to watch, but perhaps most especially as the spinsterish Hannah in ‘The Night of the Iguana’ at the National Theatre in 1992. She’s no mean writer either, adapting ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf, her favourite author, for film, and creating with Jean Marsh the television series ‘Upstairs Downstairs’. Now she’s swapping Miss Deborah’s bonnet for a hat to play the imperious, upper-class Mrs Rafi in Edward Bond’s ‘The Sea’ directed by Jonathan Kent at the Haymarket Theatre Royal.
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During her lunch break, the actress settles herself with a painful leg propped up on a chair, injured in a fall while chasing a bus, and proceeds to embark on why Christmas is the worst of times to be rehearsing. The spark in her voice belies the list of moans that begins with the fact that ‘at my age, it’s a time of year when everybody dies. In one week I had to speak at somebody’s funeral, go to a memorial service for somebody else and heard that a good friend had died as well. The awful thing is he’s had to be put on ice for Christmas. He’s waiting because there’s such a pile up. So it’s carol concerts, funerals, and memorial services.’

There’s a wild funeral in ‘The Sea’, dominated by Mrs Rafi, a part that was originally played by Coral Browne, and then by Atkins’ friend Judi Dench at the National Theatre. The play explores Britain’s class-ridden society at the beginning of the twentieth century and the powerful, ‘Tempest’-like influence of the sea over the characters. The funeral takes place on a cliff top to the accompaniment of music from an upright piano, followed by Mrs Rafi throwing the drowned man’s ashes at a mad draper saying ‘Have you no respect for the dead?’.

Unusually for Bond, it’s a comedy, or rather what Atkins calls a ‘melancholy farce’. Apparently the playwright was shocked to discover that Atkins doesn’t come from the same class as Mrs Rafi. Far from it. She was born in a council estate in Tottenham in 1934. Her mother was told by a gypsy that her daughter would be a great dancer. ‘So I was sent to dancing school. My mother always longed for a little girl. She was very big and fat and she felt plain and cumbersome. She wanted her daughter to perform.’ Atkins used to dance in working men’s clubs for 15 shillings a go. It was also her mother who pushed her into getting a scholarship and going to grammar school. There the English teacher took a shine to her and put her in all the plays. No wonder she’s not keen on the abolition of grammar schools.

Part of her education involved losing her accent. ‘The weird thing was that when I finished drama school,’ she explains, ‘the fashionable accent was north country. So I went from being really cockney, to trying to be like Celia Johnson, to putting on a slight north country accent whenever I went for a part. That was the in thing because of Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and all that lot.’ She doesn’t agree with those drama schools today who say that their students mustn’t lose their natural accents or ‘they’ll lose their souls’. She emphasises ‘souls’ to show how absurd she thinks the concept is. But there are a couple of actors, I suggest, who do sound stilted because they have acquired a different accent. ‘You think they’ve lost their souls?’ she wonders. ‘Maybe they’re just two silly men. Maybe they’ve taken themselves a touch too seriously. That’s a different thing altogether.’ So she’s quite opinionated then? ‘Oh yes. I’m always clear. I never feel so-so about anything.’

Mrs Rafi may be a bossy old bat but she does have a degree of self-knowledge lacking in most of the other people onstage. At one point she imagines being helpless in a wheelchair while all the women she’s terrorised take their revenge. Atkins herself takes a robust line on growing old. ‘What’s the point of being gloomy before you have to be? I think about death more than being old. Alec Guinness was always working out how he could alter his home to accommodate a wheelchair. Even when he was in his forties. Of course, what happened was that he got cancer and died very quickly. He never got into a wheelchair at all. I hope I won’t either. Both my parents died in screaming rages, and with my temperament I imagine I’ll go the same way.’

She has said that the quality that she most despises in herself is ‘garrulousness’ and it’s true that she does rattle on but you wouldn’t really want her to stop. I saw her recently presenting an award to an actor and she rightly complained about the cold. She had, she says, borrowed clothes from all the men around her but when she went up on the stage she was determined not to mention how freezing it was. ‘I said to myself, very firmly, “Nobody wants to hear you complain.” But it came straight out because everything comes straight out. I wish I had more control. The man I lived with for years used to say there’s something wrong with the lid on your saucepan. It keeps coming off. It gets me into a lot of trouble. I remember being at a lunch once in the country with some agent who thought he was Lord Muck, and it came out that I had been born in a council estate in Tottenham. He said “Good lord! It must be extraordinary for you to find yourself here.” And out of my mouth came: “Do you honestly think it’s my ambition in life to sit around with a lot of men wearing silk polo-neck sweaters pretending to be country men?” I had to leave because I had been so rude.’

She was keen to do ‘Cranford’ when it was offered but not because of the part. ‘Oddly enough, I thought it was a rotten part. But I knew I would have a wonderful time with all those lovely women. The big surprise was that the role turned out to be quite a good one. Initially, I thought I was the only one who wasn’t funny. I was moaning about it after the second reading when a young man came up to me and said: “I love your character. I’d love an aunt or a godmother like you.” Then two more came up and said the same sort of thing and I realised that they are desperate for some kind of discipline and backbone and they’re tired of all these liberal people who say “Do what you like, darling”. The old gong has just swung too far. They now want somebody to be very strict with them indeed,’ she says with relish. I should think she’ll be very good as Mrs Rafi. To the manner acquired rather than born.

‘The Sea’ previews from Jan 17 at the Haymarket Theatre Royal