Routledge happy to keep on appearing
THE year after Patricia Routledge metaphorically killed off her most famous creation she was voted the nation's all-time favourite actress in a BBC poll.
But despite five years of ratings-topping success in Keeping Up Appearances - cementing her status as a national treasure - Routledge "pulled the plug on the monster" Hyacinth Bucket because she wanted to have "other adventures".
"I felt the writer was recycling old ideas," she tells me in those familiar rich fruity tones that make you think of tea in dusty vicarages. "But it was great fun and it would be churlish to not appreciate what it's brought in its wake."
Sitting in her dressing room at Hampstead Theatre, looking remarkably youthful for her 77 years, you realise how long she's been a fixture in the public imagination, embodying a certain bullish, bossy British bluestocking.
Her pensioner sleuth Hetty Wainthropp was a delightfully flinty northern Miss Marple with a Thatcher-like grip on her handbag, while her Kitty monologues in Victoria Wood As Seen on TV were a precursor to Hyacinth's outrageously overbearing middle England snobbery.
Of course in person she's more quietly self-contained, with a nicely wry humour that confirms her as a naturally funny woman.
She's not egotistical, but she is proud that the upper echelons of the Catholic clergy were huge Hyacinth fans.
"I once sat next to Archbishop [Derek] Warlock at a celebratory dinner in Liverpool and to my amazement the man had time to watch Keeping Up Appearances. I told him 'I hope I have the wisdom to part with it at the right time' and he said 'go on with it as long as it gives you pleasure, not the public, but you, because if it doesn't that will show'. I thought that was very wise and wonderful."
She chuckles that a Monsignor once told her the late Cardinal Basil Hulme used to bang his foot on the floor as he chuckled at her sitcom.
"He said there was a lot of banging for half an hour once a week, I thought that was lovely. That thrilled me," she smiles.
The Catholic church would certainly approve of her latest role - as Benedictine nun Dame Laurentia McLachlan in Hugh Whitemore's The Best of Friends.
Based on the correspondence between Dame Laurentia, playwright George Bernard Shaw, and museum curator Sir Sydney Cockerell, it is a moving essay on a surprising trio of deep friendships.
"It was a unique non-sexual, civilised relationship of the kind that happened in the 18th century but you don't get today," says Routledge.
"Nowadays a single woman can't have a friendship with a man without a lot of nonsense being implied about it, but although it was intense between her and Cockerell it was an affair of the heart and mind."
The strength of The Best of Friends lies in allowing the Shavian wit, Cockerell's acute observation, and Dame Laurentia's directness and humour to shine through in their own words.
"It's bedrock authenticity because it's from their letters and journals," says Routledge. "It's always challenging to play a person who's been alive. It's a great responsibility."
With Cockerell an avowed atheist, Shaw an open-minded agnostic and Dame Laurentia a committed Christian, their letters revolve around questions of faith.
To research the part, Routledge spent four days at Stanbrook Abbey in Worcestershire, where Dame Laurentia lived for 69 years, rising to become abbess until her death in 1953. After attending the rigid series of services, and observing the rules of a mostly silent order, can Routledge relate to Dame Laurentia's decision to eschew the material world in favour of the spiritual?
"Yes I can quite easily," she says. "It was a great honour and it made a deep impression on me. Everything I seem to do is informed by it. Some of the nuns have been there for 50 years and the main focus in their lives is sung worship. They are intensely happy and the sound of the girls in the chapel moves me beyond measure. Their average age is 65 but they sound like young girls because of the purity of sound."
Like Dame Laurentia, Routledge, who never married, lives alone and has previously said she enjoys her own company, is clearly made of stern stuff. She was not one to fall apart when forced into quiet contemplation away from modern diversions.
"I loved the quality of silence, the peace of it was extraordinary," she says. "We all talk too much these days and say nothing. The mania of the 21st century is to fill silence with meaningless sounds."
She adds sadly: "In Dame Laurentia's day there were 84 nuns, now there are only 24. Young women don't respond to this kind of vocation any more. If they do become nuns they want to be out in the world in short skirts."
Although she owns up to being a "struggling pilgrim" when it comes to her own faith, the visit has clearly helped her get a handle on Dame Laurentia's, practical, single-minded dedication to God.
"She had no sense of loss - as she says, when she came into the order there wasn't much to give up and she felt whatever handicaps there seemed to be it was given back to her a hundred-fold."
Born in 1929 in Birkenhead, Routledge was the daughter of a haberdasher and has often spoken of her extremely happy childhood as a much-loved child. She studied English at Liverpool University where she first realised the thrill of acting.
While working as an assistant stage manager at the Liverpool Playhouse she was invited to join the company and found herself doing A Midsummer Night's Dream. She later trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and enjoyed early success in the West End and on Broadway, often in musicals and straight drama.
More recently she has been closely associated with Alan Bennett, performing in A Woman of No Importance and A Lady of Letters, both written for her.
It is her work in front of the camera that has made her a household name but the former queen of TV comedy despairs about the current state of the small screen.
"Don't get me started on whatever's going on in TV," she booms. "You have to be an estate agent, a cook or a nonentity to be a leading player."
Although she works across all media, she believes the theatre has the potential to be most powerful.
"What's a thrill is good writing. Appropriate writing that does what it sets out to do, be it sitcom, drama or whodunit, whether for, radio, TV, film or theatre - you can survive poor writing but you can't transcend it.
"But when it works, there is nothing like transmitting an imaginative experience to a live audience - sharing it with them - this is what all communication is about."
She has a proper British aversion to emoting about what she calls "the business of acting" and says she has turned down offers to teach comedy masterclasses because "it's dangerous to analyse what you do".
"With Shakespeare, or Chekhov, or Restoration Comedy, it's all there for you really, you just have to get on with it using your resources - the voice and the body. Whatever the medium, your obligation is to tell the story. Acting is just a physicalisation of the imagination. The word becoming flesh through voice and body and gesture."
Although she chides actors who moan about working too hard ("This job is a luxury, no one held a gun to your head.") she seems to be enjoying the release from the punishing recording schedules for annual TV series.
"I have learned this last year about doing holidays and they are quite a good idea," she smiles.
She certainly has no retirement plans, but if her age has affected her, it is in careful consideration of new projects. "I am more likely to ask 'do I want to burn up my energy on this' ."
Then she adds briskly: "I hope I will have the nous to stop when I have no longer got a grip."
The Best of Friends runs at Hampstead Theatre until April 1.
|
|
|
|
|
|