Feisty Felicity is getting into an Argument
FELICITY Kendal said she never had a problem dealing with unwanted advances from lecherous men.
The actress refused to go into detail but said succinctly: ‘Let’s put it this way: I’ve never suffered from that situation.’
She added: ‘ That’s probably because I was able to handle it. It’s a tricky one, because I don’t think we’re ever going to improve the world to such a degree that human beings don’t behave like complete a***holes.
‘We just have to re- educate ourselves to being able to firmly say “No”. It’s very simple — a bit like drugs. Just Say No.’
She conceded that sometimes, the consequences of being adamant ‘may be terrible’. ‘But it’s the choice of women now to say something.’
Kendal mentioned Edith Eger’s harrowing memoir The Choice, about surviving Auschwitz, and exhorted people to read it. ‘ Out of every disaster, you get a choice,’ said the actress, who, despite acclaimed work on stage and television, is still best known for The Good Life — a TV sitcom she finished working on four decades ago.
We had arranged to talk about The Argument, the William Boyd play she has agreed to do for producer Danny Moar at the Theatre Royal, Bath, from August 7. The black comedy, directed by Christopher Luscombe, is about a series of lacerating altercations involving a couple and the woman’s parents.
It was first staged at Hampstead Theatre’s experimental downstairs studio but Boyd has rewritten some of it, so to all intents and purposes it’s a new work.
KENDALsaid she liked it immediately, noting that Boyd is ‘wonderful at writing for women’, and telling me she had been lucky, over the years, with the male playwrights she’d worked with. ‘Shakespeare wasn’t bad,’ she joked, before going on to
praise Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton and David Hare.
Sitting in her country home in Hampshire, where (a Good Lifeesque touch) the roof had sprung a leak, she told me The Argument had tempted her back to work after ‘a year and a bit’ off — a rare period of relaxation for her.
She admitted she felt ‘a terrible guilt if I didn’t always do everything I was offered’ — a work ethic instilled by her actormanager father, Geoffrey Kendal.
Returning to her earlier theme, she said #MeToo matters had ‘become a minefield’.
‘If you’re quoted in black and white, it can be taken in so many different ways. I’m not in a position — politically, psychologically or any kind of way — to start commenting on it.
‘You can’t pass judgment on somebody else’s life or situation. Some people are being judge and jury,’ she said, observing that it’s not always ‘a totally female situation’.
‘It has happened to men and women. The shame-and-blame thing is dangerous.
‘It’s time to clean up the act,’ she agreed, ‘but judging people is for the courts to do.’
Boyd’s play is still casting other roles and there are already tentative discussions about it transferring to the West End. But Kendal cautioned that they need to see how audiences get on with it in Bath, first.