‘She was an extremely clever woman’

Penelope Wilton, set to play the Queen Mother, reveals the sadness behind the corgis, hats and handbags

By Elizabeth GRICE

Penelope Wilton can still travel incognito. It’s curious that half a century of exposure on stage and screen, packed with glorious parts, awards and a damehood, has not spoiled her secret satisfaction in being able to merge with the crowd. Yet the moment she opens her mouth her cover is blown. That voice! Classy, correct, crystalline and absolutely unmistakable. It could launch a thousand ships.

It gives emotional heft to the graveyard-bench confidences of Anne, the empathetic widow in Ricky Gervais’s comedy-drama After Life. It’s integral to the brittle dignity of Isobel Crawley in Downton Abbey and it vibrates with controlled passion in the 2014 play Taken at Midnight for which she won an Olivier as Irmgard, the Jewish mother confronting the Gestapo over the incarceration of her son.

Soon it will be trained on Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, and in case you might imagine that she’ll be wafting gently along on a wave of public adoration she issues a prompt corrective.

“There’s nothing sentimental about this. The Queen Mother was an extremely clever woman – very, very quick. She could be acerbic.”

When she refused to leave London during the Second World War, “Hitler said she was the most dangerous woman in Europe. I think she was marvellous and I hope this play makes her more Technicolor and sharp so she’s not just a pale lady in chiffon. There was nothing she didn’t find interesting.”

Backstairs Billy, by the BritishBrazilian-Australian playwright Marcelo Dos Santos, is about the unconventional relationship between the Queen Mother and her loyal but wayward servant, William Tallon, who more or less ran her life for 50 years until she died in 2002 at the age of 101.

“Although we are attempting to make me look like her physically,” says Wilton, “I’m not going to be doing an impersonation of her. It’s fiction. A made-up fantasy about what their lives were like at Clarence House. We don’t know how they talk. Biographers who put thoughts into words [spoken by their subjects] are rather annoying, actually, because how would they know?”

Still, by way of research she has immersed herself in the biographies so that no detail of the Queen Mother’s dress, mannerisms, heel-height, handbag size, salmon-fishing expertise or courtly extravagance escapes her. And, being Wilton, she absorbs the central truth that the party-loving ex-queen was probably, deep down, a lonely woman, widowed at 51 and needing to find a new way of living. There are poignant scenes as well as funny ones.

“She was of her time,” says Wilton, “an Edwardian lady. She was politically incorrect. She had served her country well and went on living the life that she wanted to live.”

More than anyone else (except perhaps Queen Elizabeth II, who bailed her mother out when she overspent) “Backstairs Billy” made that possible. Tallon was the ultimate devotee, anticipating her every need, getting her breakfast, ordering the flowers, looking after the corgis, organising guests at luncheons and receptions and always over-diligently topping up the champagne.

Above all, he was amusing. She enjoyed his gentle mockery of some of the people she met and overlooked his sexual forays. “He made her life much more entertaining,” says Wilton. “She trusted him. She enjoyed his company. He didn’t have a family because he was gay and she adored him.”

The year is 1979. Britain is crippled by strikes and riots. The action takes place in her apartment at Clarence House which has caught some of the febrile atmosphere outside the palace gates. “The country was having a sort of nervous breakdown, as indeed it is now,” says Wilton.

The play’s comic potential lies in the Queen Mother’s relationships with her friends and the behaviour of people in her presence. “People about to meet the Royal family say, ‘Oh, I don’t care,’ but actually they do,” says Wilton. “They find themselves tongue-tied. They forget to curtsy. The Queen Mother was very good at putting them at ease.”

The play was commissioned by its director Michael Grandage, whose friend the late Una Stubbs had often told him, from first-hand stories of the Clarence House court, that Tallon would be a brilliant subject for a play.

The part lured the Welsh actor Luke Evans, 44, back to the stage after 16 years in film and television (including Beauty and the Beast and the Fast & Furious films) and Wilton,

loss of a premature son, she had a daughter, Alice, a theatre producer. Alice, 46, and her family live close by in west London and Wilton enjoys being a big part of the lives of her grandchildren, Daniel, 11, and Ella, seven.

She likes the freedom of living by herself in a house ever-open to family and friends. “I can do what I like. I can go to bed at half-past eight if I want and I can eat what I want, when I want.”

After a well-paid film, such as The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel or Downton, she will buy herself a painting.

Anne Carson – regularly tipped for the Nobel Prize – is a restless, mercurial talent, reinventing her style with each new book. This brand-new poem for The Telegraph, like many of Carson’s poems, offers a glimpse of a story that continues beyond its margins. A “pale” youth arrives with two cameramen, to record his apology to another man, Faisal, whose family he “may have detonated” in a war or act of terrorism – the context is ambiguous. It’s the kind of cathartic encounter that documentarymakers long for. (Think, for instance, of 2014’s The Look of Silence, in which a man meets the killers who murdered his uncle in the Indonesian Communist Purge).

The claustrophobic form of the poem

– a tight column of justified prose – mirrors its setting, a “room that seems now small, every inch of it pressed by his pressure”. We’re implicated as voyeurs: “None of us can watch. We watch.” The staged handshake may be meaningless (“What is an apology? Do the dead care[?]”). Yet their conversation remains private, unrecorded by both the poet and the cameras. We’re left with uncomfortable questions; the only closure here comes from the door to the apartment as it clicks shut, locking us out. Tristram Fane Saunders

His eyes are small black animals. We’d left our door open. He strides in with the two cameramen. Stops. We go forward to shake his hand. He looks nine years old although he must be twenty. He’s had a haircut, I think. He obviously doesn’t remember us, we only met him once but they needed somebody’s apartment to do this in, he is trying to align his face, others propel him forward. He’s pale, large in the room, the room that seems now small, every inch of it pressed by his pressure. His pressure is too great. None of us can watch. We watch. He goes toward Faisal. Faisal’s face opens into the dazzling smile he cannot help smiling because to welcome strangers is his upbringing, even strangers who may have detonated his family. Cameramen move close to record the boy and Faisal shaking hands. The handshake stops. The cameras stop. Faisal continues to stand, uncertain. The boy looms, then drops to the couch as if from a great height, staring at air, nothing, chaos. A vibration comes off him. They had both expressed a wish for no cameras while they talk. What is an apology? Do the dead care and when might they break loose like maddened horses but they don’t. We leave the room, whispering, Lock it when you go.