There is pleasure in playing “irredeemable baddies”
Tim Frances was in Chichester in 2011 in the production of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and then he returned in 2017 in Sweet Bird Of Youth.
Now he is back in 2022 to play someone really truly horrible, Frederick Brook in The Taxidermist’s Daughter, Chichester Festival Theatre’s main-house summer season opener, a new play by Chichester’s best-selling author Kate Mosse, based on her own novel.
It runs from April 8-30.
Tim is delighted to be the villain of the piece – a great way to come back to the stage after all the frustrations and the disappointments of the pandemic and all its lockdowns.
“I first heard about this back in November and I think it was when Kate had written a working draught and they got a dozen of us to work on the script with her. We did a twoday workshop. Coming out of lockdown which had been two years of desert, it was just so lovely to be in a room with actors and a writer and a director and it was such a lovely atmosphere that I really wanted to be part of it.
“Lockdown was terrible. It was like being robbed of something. I had finished a play just before the first lockdown started so at least I was able to finish a run and I went back to Kent where I live and I guess it was just like with everybody. We were all thinking it may be a few weeks or then it was maybe three months but it ended up being two years virtually. It was horrible just not being able to be in the same room as other actors.
“I was able to do voice work and it was a good medicine but voice-over work is a solitary occupation. You are hermetically sealed and it was just horrible but I do think I was always optimistic that somehow we would be able to get back to something.
“For actors togetherness is that collegiate way of working and it is so important and it was terrible to be without it. So this is my first play in almost exactly two years and it’s a lovely one to start with. One of the reasons I wanted to do it was having been to Chichester twice before I knew how much I liked the place. This is very much Kate’s production. It is her novel and it is her adaptation. We did the two days of offering up ideas and playing around with it but and then she went away and wrote it again but it is very much her piece. We stuck our threepennyworth in but the production is hers and it is great.”
The piece is set in 1912. In the isolated Blackthorn House on Sussex’s Fishbourne Marshes, Connie Gifford lives with her father. His Museum of Avian Taxidermy was once legendary, but since its closure Gifford has become a broken man, taking refuge in the bottle. Robbed of her childhood memories by a mysterious accident, Connie is haunted by fitful glimpses of her past. A strange woman has been seen in the graveyard; and at Chichester’s Graylingwell Asylum, two female patients have, inexplicably, disappeared.
As a major storm hits the Sussex landscape, old wounds are about to be opened…
“The character I’m playing is glorious. He is disgusting and scary and nasty and vulgar and violent. He is gloriously vulgarly nasty and there is a particular pleasure in playing irredeemable baddies certainly.” To an extent he is a product of his time: “In terms of the play, it is about extreme entitlement and very powerful men. That’s one of the things that she is exploring. He is a local big wig and he can get away with things. He knows he can do what he wants so there is no conscience. There is nothing stopping him. It is about his class and his money and his wealth. As a man of influence and means in a hidebound class system he can indulge his pleasures and his vicissitudes without consequences. He just knows he can do what he wants and there’s nothing anybody can do to stop him until one character says ‘I will take this on.’ After that it is a story of justice and vengeance.”