‘I don’t think theatre should be preachy’
Actress Lindsay Duncan’s new play tackles snobbery and homophobia – but its first duty is to entertain, she tells Ben Lawrence
When you think of Lindsay Duncan, you tend to think of her roles in which she expertly deploys a sort of elegant froideur. As the Marquise in the RSC’S landmark adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, she was icily composed while hinting at erotic possibility. On TV in Alan Bleasdale’s GBH, she played Barbara Douglas, a mysterious woman in possession of a dazzling array of sunhats with the potential to corrupt very corruptible politician Michael Murray – all it took from her was a short, elliptical sentence uttered in a low, beautifully modulated whisper.
So it’s odd to find that, in the flesh, Duncan – while reassuringly elegant – is someone whose emotions are very close to the surface. We meet in a back office at London’s National Theatre to talk about her new play, Hansard, and almost immediately her rich and rather soothing voice starts to tremble.
“This means so much to me,” she says. “This play is about important stuff about inclusivity and tolerance and it is written in a way that will make people listen. I want it to speak for itself and I will do my damnedest to make that happen.”
Hansard, written by the former actor Simon Woods, is ostensibly a portrait of a marriage in decline as Diana (Duncan) and her husband Robin (Alex Jennings) – an articulate couple with an emotional deficit – turn their relationship into a sort of blood sport within the comfort of their capacious Oxfordshire home.
But it is also political and this, it seems, is the cause for Duncan’s emotional commitment. The play is set in 1988 and Robin, a Tory MP, is supporting his party’s enactment of Section 28, which stated that no local authority could promote homosexuality, including the teaching “of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”.
Duncan, whose star was ascendant at the time, remembers it well. “My closest friends were gay and I remember the anger, the disbelief. I mean, it was unbelievably crude…
“For me and for friends, it has never lost its potency. It’s like the clanging of a bell of doom. It seems incredible to me that people would be marginalised. No,” she pauses. “More than marginalised. Excluded, treated with cruelty. And yet the blinkers are back on, aren’t they?” Duncan is referring, I guess, to the recent LGBT row in certain schools where the
normalisation of homosexuality has met with vituperation from several quarters, including those who say it is intolerant of Islamic beliefs. It is a tinderbox, for sure, and Woods, who started working on the play long before the row erupted, couldn’t believe its accidental resonance.
“It is awful watching current events catch up with the events of the play,” he tells me. “When I was starting on this, one of the responses was that I was rehashing a dead argument. ‘We have moved on. Progress has been made,’ they said. There is a strangeness and sadness to seeing Section 28 become relevant again.”
Hansard is also about class. Robin is a clubbable old Etonian; Diana is a rung or two further down the social ladder. “All of the pernicious subtleties of the English class system has led to this tiny little dent in her confidence,” says Duncan.
There are parallels, too, with Margaret Thatcher (whom Duncan played in a 2009 TV film), who is regarded with a sort of disdain by Robin on account of her modest upbringing. Sneeringly, he suggests that she had to study hard because it was the only possible way she could enter the corridors of power.
Although politically far removed from Thatcher, Duncan has sympathy with her outsider status and how she was viewed by certain members of her cabinet.
“To some of them, it was like she didn’t exist because she wasn’t the right class or gender – this grocer’s daughter from Grantham. I find that pretty chilling, actually. And in the end, they threw her overboard, didn’t they? They were ruthless.”
People wrongly assume Duncan is posh. She was born in Scotland in 1950 to a working-class Glaswegian father and mother from Edinburgh. She was mostly brought up in Birmingham where, she says, her mother did her utmost to ensure that now-famous articulation of vowels. “She just wouldn’t have tolerated a Brummie accent,” laughs Duncan.
“She was so hot on education, and looking back now I find it very moving that my mother was determined I should learn to spell and to speak properly but, at the same time, allow me the freedom to do whatever I wanted. When I decided to become an actor, there was no sense of ‘But I thought you were going to be a doctor’.”
Duncan admits she was lucky. She attended Bristol Old Vic drama school and didn’t have to pay a penny. Now, things are rather different, with many gifted students from less well-off backgrounds deterred by the prohibitive fees.
“It’s really not good,” she says. “If any area needs to be properly representative, it is the arts. It is important that we have writers, directors and actors who come from a broad range of backgrounds. Everybody matters.”
Early on, Duncan tells me, she didn’t really know what she was doing, that she “padded on without a huge amount of confidence”.
Certainly, her first TV role – as a character called Scrubba in Frankie Howerd’s ribald comedy Further Up Pompeii – was a baptism of fire.
“At the photocall,” she recalls, “I was asked to lean forward a little bit [Duncan makes a little gesture to
‘To some of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet, it was like she didn’t exist because she wasn’t the right class or gender’
imply that the request was to show a bit more cleavage] and then I got back from work to my then-boyfriend and I just burst into tears. It never occurred to me to say no because the programme was all about innuendo and I was playing this buxom sort of character… But to have to lean forward like that was so distressing.
“But I did see Frankie Howerd in action so that was fun. I’m actually quite proud of that show.”
Further Up Pompeii is an odd footnote in a career that has been defined by classical theatre roles and high-end modern drama (Harold Pinter was a friend – “Harold had a very soft spot for actors and to see him in the bar afterwards was to see a happy man”), quality TV dramas (she is an acolyte of such auteurs as Alan Bleasdale and Stephen Poliakoff) and the odd movie hit (such as Le Weekend, a lovely, slow-burning drama of 2013 in which she and Jim Broadbent played an academic couple in late middle age trying to rejuvenate their failing marriage). It’s a diverse CV, and I assume that Duncan has had the career that she wanted.
“Well, I could never have anticipated it. But now I don’t have any specific ambitions. I mean, I gently think about what I want to do, but I think in terms of life and work now. I know I want more breathing space.
“People still think of me as a theatre actress but I am not going to be doing eight shows a week, maybe ever again. But I have no agony about that.
“I sometimes think, ‘Yes, I want to do a new play’, but the truth is I have done an awful lot. I don’t have that appetite anymore because I find it costly now, as well as thrilling and fulfilling.”
We should treasure her performance in Hansard, then. Several films are due for release within the next few months, including Blackbird, a drama about a terminally ill woman starring Kate Winslet.
Duncan seems happy, contented almost (she plans to do some travelling with her husband, fellow actor Hilton Mcrae, with whom she has a grown-up son), but one can’t help thinking that British theatre will be poorer without her, not only for her performances but particularly her passion for its place as an arena of possibilities.
“I don’t think theatre should be preachy, it should be more skilful than that. Like a Trojan horse carrying important stuff inside.”
And does Hansard do that? She signs, and again I feel a groundswell of emotion. “It offers the chance for us to see ourselves from the outside looking in. At the moment we need every possible way to take stock and remember what is important in life.”
Hansard is at the National Theatre until Nov 25. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk.
It will be shown live in cinemas on Nov 7; ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk