#Metoo is a huge overreaction
With a new show at Edinburgh Festival, Maureen Lipman tells Craig Mclean about mortality, anti-semitism in politics — and why she thinks #Metoo has gone too far
In late May, Maureen Lipman gave the world a jolt when the news flashed up that the 72-year-old had “collapsed” on stage during a performance of a political drama in the West End. Yet, just shy of two months later, Lipman greets me in fine fettle in a gastro-pub near her flat in Paddington.
Chic and elegantly coiffed, we are meeting to talk about her forthcoming run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. While it’s not quite a one-woman show, it is her first appearance at the world’s biggest arts festival in 53 bone-shaking years.
As the title of her new “rave, rollick and rant” musical show has it,
Maureen Lipman is Up for It. Which is just as well considering the shock she gave theatre audiences earlier this year.
“I’d gone for breakfast with a friend,” she begins by way of explanation for her medical emergency, “one of these stupid fusion things that my stomach can’t cope with – avocado, chilli with poached eggs on charcoal sourdough. This is not the food for a girl from Hull,” snorts the actress/ comedian/raconteur/writer who we seem obliged to describe as both “veteran” and “national treasure” – not to mention “no-nonsense”.
The last time she fainted, she adds, was in Marrakesh, in the Yves Saint Laurent garden, “because I’d eaten muesli. Things like that just go straight through me. But I’m a greedy pig,” she beams blithely.
In typical form, she bats away any concerns that maybe it is time to take it a bit easy. She keeps fit with a “serious” gardening habit and a trainer who comes once a week.
“I should do more,” Lipman admits. “But I know that if I join a gym, I just won’t go. I started tango, which I loved, but I just stopped doing it. I never stick with the things I like. I stick with things I don’t like!”
Is she mindful of how much she drinks? Well, she can’t drink red wine because it gives her migraines. And Guido Castro, the Italian-egyptian businessman who has been her partner these past 10 years, has turned her on to a nice white, a glass of which she’s enjoying as we talk. But she and playwright Jack Rosenthal, her late husband, were always happy with a £5 bottle of plonk. All things considered, though, she’s not taking anything for granted and has recently had some painful reminders of her mortality.
“I’ve lost six really good friends since January,” she states matter-offactly. “I write a lot of condolence letters, I keep up with a lot of people who have had or are having chemo, I speak at a lot of memorials. I’m very well aware that that is the nature of my peer group.”
Lipman is not one for biting her tongue, about herself or others. She is also pretty much still up for most things that come her way. Assiduous television viewers might have guessed as much from a recent appearance on the small screen. Playing a stern landlady in the last series of ITV’S hilarious, cult Roman historical comedy Plebs, this grande dame of theatre, well, violated a ruminant.
She’s witheringly self-deprecating about the declining career prospects of the ageing actor. Her Edinburgh show features a section where she ponders the lot of the likes of herself, Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes. Too old to play detectives or doctors, she and her septuagenarian peers are instead dispatched on documentary wanderings around England, “pointing at things”.
So this Up for It sketch namechecks Michael Portillo on a train somewhere, Penelope Keith in a pretty village, and Prunella Scales and Timothy West drifting past on a barge.
And where’s Margolyes, last seen traveloguing her way around Trump’s America? “I’ve got her.
She’s coming back from her own show, which is called Farting in Five Continents.
And Joanna’s in the sky, of course, because she’s taking a llama to the Dalai Lama.
“And what am I doing?” she wonders rhetorically. “I’m trying to stick a pitchfork up Ken Livingstone’s a***. It’s a new game involving ex-members of the Labour Party.” Her “problems with Miriam” are “because of Israel”, acknowledges this outspoken champion of the Jewish state. (In 2012 Lipman criticised Margolyes’ objection to Israel’s national theatre company performing at the Globe.) And they’re similar to the problems she has with her formerly preferred political party. Why, I ask her, has Jeremy Corbyn failed to the grasp the nettle of anti-semitism within the party?
“Because there’s no votes in it for him. It doesn’t matter if we all turn to the Conservative Party.” As she sees it, 240,000 Jewish votes is “meaningless compared to… the other vote”. The pro-palestine vote? “Yeah, or the Muslim vote. Of course, as soon as the economy dipped, you’ve got to cast around for a worthy scapegoat. And we’re pretty good at that,” she says, lightly “it’s in the genes.” Still, if there was an election tomorrow, she’s “not quite” ready to vote Conservative. Rather, she’d plump for the Lib Dems, albeit lukewarmly: she “rather likes” Vince Cable and “feels sorry” for Nick Clegg.
She’s equally unafraid to speak her provocative mind with regards to the #Metoo movement. She reckons it’s gone too far. “It’s just the same as the Jimmy Savile thing: you’ve missed the main predator for so long, which makes you feel so utterly abject, that you then think: ‘Yeah, and I bet he’s one…’ So they go for these unfashionable light entertainment blokes who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and make their lives hell.”
There is, she thinks, “a huge overreaction going on. If Dustin Hoffman put his hand on someone’s knee 40 years ago and [we have to] boycott films, it’s just bloody stupid. Separate the real rapists, the ones who dope women’s drinks.
“Let us not get into Polanski, because I know the man,” she adds. The film-maker directed Lipman in 2002’s Oscar-winning The Pianist. “Polanski was an abused child. And he flew too near to the sun too quickly. And he is a very short man,” she smiles.
“But I think 60 years of punishment is probably enough for doing what in the Sixties was pretty prevalent. The lesson, really, is: let’s get on with it from today. Let’s teach our daughters, and our sons, I suppose: it is possible to say ‘no’ without rancour, without anger, without emotion,” notes this mother of two, who are both in the family business: Amy Rosenthal is, like her dad, a playwright; Adam Rosenthal is a screenwriter and actor.
“And, yes, you’ll lose the job. In which case,” she shrugs, “try again.”
She says all of this despite having had her own moment of sexual peril.
After making her film debut in classic kitchen-sink drama Up the Junction in 1968, the following year Lipman was telephoned by an American actor who’d seen the film on a plane to the UK. He was in The
Boston Strangler, she says, but no, it wasn’t Tony Curtis or Henry Fonda. “I think you have a good deal of untapped sexuality,” he told the then 20-something Lipman. “Meet me at the Saint George’s Hotel in Marylebone in an hour and a half. Don’t wear black velvet trousers.” Lipman’s eyes widen.
“Who would go?” Presumably not her? “Course I went!” she exclaims. “That’s what I’m saying: we have to educate our young people to think: ‘That is not a good idea, Maureen’. In the end I got myself out a really difficult situation just with jokes. Men hate women who tell jokes. That was the only time I had a situation like that. And it was my own fault, because I went. So, don’t go to Mike Tyson’s bedroom if you think you’re going to play Scrabble.”
Maureen Lipman is still, clearly, very much up for it. Whether engaging with thorny political issues, wading into culture wars, pricking her peers or ribbing herself, the lady’s not for turning quiet. Her Edinburgh run should be a riot. It definitely will be if her aftershow plans come to pass. Her friend Kathy Lette, the comic author, also has a show on the Fringe.
Both are done and offstage at 6.45pm, “so then we’ll tear up the town. Yeah! Lock up your sons,” Lipman winks, “two cougars on the trail…”
Up for It is at Assembly George Square Theatre, Edinburgh, August 1-12, 5.45pm. Bookings: assemblyfestival.com, 0131 623 3030 or Assembly box offices
‘If Dustin Hoffman put his hand on someone’s knee 40 years ago and we boycott him – it’s stupid’