performance Martin changed all the clocks, and he had taped the sound of the audience arriving at the beginning of the show. Nigel was sitting in his dressing room with curlers in his hair, thinking he had got plenty of time to get ready, and Martin played the tape of the curtain going up. Nigel knew he had to get down the stairs, under the stage and up the other side, and he was screaming and throwing the curlers off. Any other man would have had a heart attack. He ran on to the stage, and we were all standing there waiting for him, with the safety curtain down. He was completely shattered. Nigel told me later that it was because he used to pull a trick on Martin, who had said, ‘I’ll get back at you for this.’
After Wilde and Pinter, my next playwright was Hugh Whitemore, in Pack of Lies , which was based on the real-life story of the Portland spy ring run by the Krogers and Gordon Lonsdale, and its effects on their unsuspecting neighbours, played by Michael and me. Apparently the script had been turned down by several other actresses before it was sent to me. Michael read it and said, ‘Just read these two lines in Act II.’ So I read the two lines and said, ‘Oh yes, I would do that.’ Since I am notorious for not reading scripts I always relied on his judgement, and he was never wrong. This time he was very enthusiastic, and went off to Ruislip to find the house where Mr and Mrs Search, the real-life couple we were playing, had lived. He had terrible difficulty finding the house, and the rooms were tiny.
Ralph Koltai had designed the set to exactly the same proportions, and we could never think how you could get more than three or four seats in that little front room. When Michael came back he told me there were thirteen chairs in that room. Bill Search still lived there on his own, and he told Michael how his wife had died in the kitchen sitting in a chair, and that scene was put in the play. The Searches were renamed the Jacksons in the script, and my character, the wife Barbara, was a very shy person. Projecting that quality to the circle and upper circle of the Lyric Theatre was really difficult, a very good kind of lesson to do every night. It was a fantastically exciting play, but I did find my part draining. I used to say that I longed to come down the stairs and say, ‘My Lord of Warwick…’ or something like that, because Barbara’s horizons were quite contained.
My great friend since the Old Vic days, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, was playing the spy Helen who betrays their friendship. Richard Vernon played the MI5 man who comes to tell the Jacksons who their friends really are, and to ask their help in catching them out. He had to come in at one point and say, ‘We’re looking for a car, a Vauxhall, with the registration number ABY 129; have you any knowledge of that?’ One day he came in and said, ‘We’re looking for a car, a Vauxhall with the registration number RU 12.’ (That is less funny on the page than it sounded on the stage: ‘Are you one too?’) Well, I had to go off and stand in the hall for a few moments to recover myself.
It was an enormous help that Michael was playing my husband, although we never talked about the theatre or work when we came home; perhaps a little bit in the car, but very little even then. I don’t like to talk about a part outside rehearsal whilst I am still working on it. It takes the edge off the spontaneity for me.
While we were both playing in Pack of Lies , our first TV sitcom A Fine Romance was being transmitted by London Weekend Television. At Christmas we had a row about the sink blocking up at our house in Hampstead. We were being driven to the theatre in a cab, and we were not speaking at all. Going down Shaftesbury Avenue before we turned into the Lyric the cab stopped at some lights, and when a lady passing suddenly caught sight of us she came right up to the window and started to sing ‘A fine romance, with no kisses’, which ended our row of
After Wilde and Pinter, my next playwright was Hugh Whitemore, in Pack of Lies , which was based on the real-life story of the Portland spy ring run by the Krogers and Gordon Lonsdale, and its effects on their unsuspecting neighbours, played by Michael and me. Apparently the script had been turned down by several other actresses before it was sent to me. Michael read it and said, ‘Just read these two lines in Act II.’ So I read the two lines and said, ‘Oh yes, I would do that.’ Since I am notorious for not reading scripts I always relied on his judgement, and he was never wrong. This time he was very enthusiastic, and went off to Ruislip to find the house where Mr and Mrs Search, the real-life couple we were playing, had lived. He had terrible difficulty finding the house, and the rooms were tiny.
Ralph Koltai had designed the set to exactly the same proportions, and we could never think how you could get more than three or four seats in that little front room. When Michael came back he told me there were thirteen chairs in that room. Bill Search still lived there on his own, and he told Michael how his wife had died in the kitchen sitting in a chair, and that scene was put in the play. The Searches were renamed the Jacksons in the script, and my character, the wife Barbara, was a very shy person. Projecting that quality to the circle and upper circle of the Lyric Theatre was really difficult, a very good kind of lesson to do every night. It was a fantastically exciting play, but I did find my part draining. I used to say that I longed to come down the stairs and say, ‘My Lord of Warwick…’ or something like that, because Barbara’s horizons were quite contained.
My great friend since the Old Vic days, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, was playing the spy Helen who betrays their friendship. Richard Vernon played the MI5 man who comes to tell the Jacksons who their friends really are, and to ask their help in catching them out. He had to come in at one point and say, ‘We’re looking for a car, a Vauxhall, with the registration number ABY 129; have you any knowledge of that?’ One day he came in and said, ‘We’re looking for a car, a Vauxhall with the registration number RU 12.’ (That is less funny on the page than it sounded on the stage: ‘Are you one too?’) Well, I had to go off and stand in the hall for a few moments to recover myself.
It was an enormous help that Michael was playing my husband, although we never talked about the theatre or work when we came home; perhaps a little bit in the car, but very little even then. I don’t like to talk about a part outside rehearsal whilst I am still working on it. It takes the edge off the spontaneity for me.
While we were both playing in Pack of Lies , our first TV sitcom A Fine Romance was being transmitted by London Weekend Television. At Christmas we had a row about the sink blocking up at our house in Hampstead. We were being driven to the theatre in a cab, and we were not speaking at all. Going down Shaftesbury Avenue before we turned into the Lyric the cab stopped at some lights, and when a lady passing suddenly caught sight of us she came right up to the window and started to sing ‘A fine romance, with no kisses’, which ended our row of
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