Selina Cadell Actress
Selina Cadell’s career as an actress spans Chekhov, Shakespeare and TV comedy – she is particularly well known to many viewers as Mrs Tishell in the much-loved series Doc Martin – and she also directs opera and theatre. Along with the composer and dramaturg Eliza Thompson, she co-founded Operaglass Works with the aim of bringing highquality opera to smaller spaces and at cheaper ticket prices. The company’s inaugural production, of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, took place at Wilton’s Music Hall, London, in 2017. This month, it stages Britten’s The Turn of the Screw at the same venue.
My parents, who were both in the theatre world, would listen to things like Noel Coward or Fred Astaire, but there wasn’t a lot of classical music in the house. One day I was visiting a godparent and I heard this extraordinary piece of music: the Marche slave by TCHAIKOVSKY. It was Russian, exotic, theatrical, patriotic – I had no idea that one piece of music could capture so many different moods. As an imaginative 12 year-old, I felt I was in a story and it would have an ending. I went straight out and bought my first LP, which had a fantastic illustration of a cannon on the cover.
I went to Bedales School in Hampshire – if you must send your children away, which you shouldn’t, at least make sure there is amazing music! We sang big theatrical pieces like Verdi’s Requiem and Orff’s Carmina Burana. I was busy pretending I wouldn’t go to drama college because my brother (Simon Cadell) was an actor and people assumed I would be an actor too. But I was mainly interested in language, story and theatre, and I did in the end go to the Central School of Speech and Drama.
I was taken to Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Coliseum by my dear friend, the American actor Peter
Evans. I said I hated opera and he said ‘You must come to this’. It was pretty incredible, but I still said to him, ‘They can’t act, and it’s embarrassing!’ Years later, I was introduced to the bass Richard van Allan at the National Opera Studio (NOS) and he asked me to teach acting to opera singers. I nearly said no, but I went to hear a class and they were doing Mimì’s death in PUCCINI’S La bohème. I thought ‘I could do this, because Puccini is like Shakespeare – there is nothing between the feeling and the note’. I began to see what a marvellous thing it could be if you could just let people trust the music. I went home and listened to Callas singing Mimì’s death. I was fascinated by the way she doesn’t do an incredible death act because Puccini has put it in music.
I became the head of acting at the NOS and from knowing very little, I learnt a lot about music and how you have to integrate the acting with the singing. They’re not separate: it’s about believing what you’re singing at the moment you’re singing it. We worked on so many wonderful things, but I loved directing 18th-century opera and HANDEL in particular. Singers would come to me and say ‘But his repeats are so boring’. No – they are the opportunity for a singer to show their art. In his Arianna in Creta, for instance, the arias and the stylised repeats are a celebration of theatrical virtuosity.
It leads me on to another vocal favourite, ELIZABETH POSTON’S carol Jesus
Christ the Apple Tree. I heard it for the first time a year after my husband [actor Michael Thomas] was diagnosed with the cancer that he died of nine years later. The simplicity of beautiful voices singing a cappella – in a chapel – up to heaven is somehow so reassuring.
When we first met, Michael introduced me to Victoria de los Ángeles singing CANTELOUBE’S Chants d’auvergne. It’s simple and yet incredibly crystallised; it somehow gathers you in to that expansive French countryside. And it’s timeless. It could be four centuries ago – that echoing soprano soaring above you like a bird. We once went camping in the Auvergne during an agricultural festival, and a microlight hovered above us in the blue sky, scattering sweets for the children. It was like I was in one of the Auvergne songs.