Britain’s favourite actress leans forward on the sofa, and lets slip the secrets of her Manchester hotel over morning tea. “It’s owned by Cliff Richard,” Patricia Routledge reveals with a cut-glass intelligence that’s a million miles from the pomp of Hyacinth Bucket, the social climbing battleaxe she made legend in 1980s TV sit-com, Keeping Up Appearances, and who remains a monster who lives on in repeat runs all over the world. “Very odd,” she says of her temporary domicile’s Peter Pan-like proprietor.
Such conspiratorial tittle-tattle could have come from the pen of Alan Bennett, the author of Office Suite, a double bill of plays originally written for television in the 1970s, which Routledge tours to Glasgow’s Theatre Royal next week. Routledge was the original star of both A Visit From Miss Prothero and Green Forms when they aired at either end of 1978 in productions by future director of The Queen, Stephen Frears. She was also the accidental instigator of this stage revival after suggesting it to Chichester Festival.
After a tour where the only serious competition was an Elton John concert in Plymouth, the morning after opening night at Salford’s Lowry centre, the Birkenhead born grand dame is clearly moved by the rapturous response of last night’s northern English audience.
It was, she says, “like coming home. They just recognised the idiom and what we were about. It was like being on a trampoline. Glorious. It’s something about the great tradition of music hall in the north. That’s what that audience felt. It’s in their bloodstream, this thing where people took thirty years to perfect their act.”
One could say similar about Routledge, who, at The Lowry at least, merely has to raise a prissy eyebrow before the entire house is falling about. Add on the stopwatch perfect delivery of Bennett’s dry, deadpan none-sequiters, and two fascinating examinations of pre-computer age office life transcend their small screen origins to become all too precient reminders of how scary the future can look.
In A Visit From Miss Prothero, Routledge plays the eponymous busybody who pays an unexpected visit to a retired former colleague, badgering him with gossip he’d rather not hear about. Green Forms, originally broadcast as Doris and Doreen, is a Kafkaesque portrayal of two middle management matriarchs about to be swept aside by the brutal hand of efficiency.
“I thought they had a lot to say in retrospect,” Routledge says of the plays, “and it’s good for people to be reminded of the huge leaps of technology that have taken place, even in the last ten years. People who are now in quite high up executive positions have said they’ve been reminded of what office life used to be like. Miss Prothero captures the all-absorbing self importance of the life of this person to herself. It’s the world on her terms, and never any sense that she might be a bore. We all know someone like that, and it’s the same with Doreen. I know three women who’ve gone through life playing the little girl. Yes, she’s bullied, but she’s a willing victim.”
Office Suite is Routledge’s latest outing with Bennett in a working relationship that began a quarter of a century ago. It could have started five years earlier, when she turned down a part in his play, Habeous Corpus. Despite this initial spurning, Bennett continued to quietly watch the actress he’d first seen in 1966 in the west end production of How’s The World Treating You?, a “wacky” play that “changed my life” when, as a direct result, in 1968, she appeared on Broadway in the musical, Darling Of The Day.
Cast adrift in a notoriously cut-throat American theatrical fraternity, she scooped a Tony award for a performance that was hailed in The New York Times as ‘the most spectacular, most scrumptious, most embraceable musical comedy debut since Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence came to this country.’ Groucho Marx presented the award.
Following her smash hit success, Routledge was wined and dined by cigar-chomping impresarios desperate to buy a piece of her. She was offered her own show, with all the swimming pools and Hollywood trappings that came with it. When this gimlet-eyed arbiter of the written word asked to see a script, however, there were blank looks and presumably even blanker pages all round. Routledge came home.
On her return to London, Routledge appeared in the Noel Coward revue, Cowardy Custard, and released Patricia Routledge Presents, an album of standards penned by Coward and other maestros. She returned to New York in 1976 to star in Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a disaster, and she returned home once more. By that time, and, unknown to Routledge, Bennett was already penning both plays in Office Suite with her specifically in mind.
In 1982, Routledge appeared in A Woman Of No Importance, the prototype of Bennett’s phenomenonally successful series of monologues, Talking Heads. Alongside Thora Hird and Julie Walters, Routledge became a member of Bennett’s occasional ensemble of his favourite actresses as yet another office fuss-budget. In 1987, the first full Talking Heads series appeared, with Routledge cast in A Lady Of Letters. A decade on, she was cast in Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet for Talking Heads 2.
“Very dark,” the astonishingly sharp veteran of stage and screen observes of the sequel. “The emphasis had shifted.”
Routledge’s own concerns have also moved considerably over the years, and younger fans of Hyacynth Bucket and of her stint in Hetty Winthrop Investigates as the really rather old fashioned lady sleuth with the common touch, might be surprised by the depth and range of her back catalogue. They certainly were with Anybody’s Nightmare, the 2001 TV film based on the true story of a woman who served four years for the murder of her elderly aunt, but who was eventually acquitted.
Routledge has no problem with such image-shattering material. “For an actress who doesn’t particularly want to promote her own personality,” she points out, “acting is assuming another personality as best you can, whatever that might be.”
While Bennett is full of praise for Routledge as a foil for his writing, he’s somewhat gnomically observed that they “come from roughly similar backgrounds, although I'd say that she was rather higher up the social scale than I was.”
“Ooh, hello,” Routledge responds to a class-consciousness that is the foundation stone of great British comedy. “I was quite amused by that.”
Routledge grew up the daughter of a gents outfitter intending to become “an avant-garde headmistress with a red sports car who had affairs – romances – all over Europe.”
As it was, trips to the local music hall via freebies granted by its owners for putting posters up in the shop exposed Routledge to all the big names of the day.
“The power of the spoken word is what I love,” she says. “Language, poetry and drama were always enjoyed by my family. They could all quote Shakespeare and Tennyson.”
Routledge didn’t set foot onstage until studying English at Liverpool University, then fell into an unpaid job at Liverpool Playhouse, and, finally, aged 23, enrolled at Bristol Old Vic drama school. Years in rep eventually led to London, where the long road to Office Suite, via being voted Britain’s Favourite Actress in 1996, began.
Alan was very diffident about them being done originally,” Routledge says of the plays. “Because he doesn’t want them to be seen as period pieces. Also, he’s quite funny about his past work, because he wants to move on all the time. But they are period pieces, and we have to honour that. But Alan’s done what he’s always done. He turns cliché into poetry.”
Office Suite, Theatre Royal, Glasgow, June 11-16
The Herald, June 6th 2007
www.
ends
Such conspiratorial tittle-tattle could have come from the pen of Alan Bennett, the author of Office Suite, a double bill of plays originally written for television in the 1970s, which Routledge tours to Glasgow’s Theatre Royal next week. Routledge was the original star of both A Visit From Miss Prothero and Green Forms when they aired at either end of 1978 in productions by future director of The Queen, Stephen Frears. She was also the accidental instigator of this stage revival after suggesting it to Chichester Festival.
After a tour where the only serious competition was an Elton John concert in Plymouth, the morning after opening night at Salford’s Lowry centre, the Birkenhead born grand dame is clearly moved by the rapturous response of last night’s northern English audience.
It was, she says, “like coming home. They just recognised the idiom and what we were about. It was like being on a trampoline. Glorious. It’s something about the great tradition of music hall in the north. That’s what that audience felt. It’s in their bloodstream, this thing where people took thirty years to perfect their act.”
One could say similar about Routledge, who, at The Lowry at least, merely has to raise a prissy eyebrow before the entire house is falling about. Add on the stopwatch perfect delivery of Bennett’s dry, deadpan none-sequiters, and two fascinating examinations of pre-computer age office life transcend their small screen origins to become all too precient reminders of how scary the future can look.
In A Visit From Miss Prothero, Routledge plays the eponymous busybody who pays an unexpected visit to a retired former colleague, badgering him with gossip he’d rather not hear about. Green Forms, originally broadcast as Doris and Doreen, is a Kafkaesque portrayal of two middle management matriarchs about to be swept aside by the brutal hand of efficiency.
“I thought they had a lot to say in retrospect,” Routledge says of the plays, “and it’s good for people to be reminded of the huge leaps of technology that have taken place, even in the last ten years. People who are now in quite high up executive positions have said they’ve been reminded of what office life used to be like. Miss Prothero captures the all-absorbing self importance of the life of this person to herself. It’s the world on her terms, and never any sense that she might be a bore. We all know someone like that, and it’s the same with Doreen. I know three women who’ve gone through life playing the little girl. Yes, she’s bullied, but she’s a willing victim.”
Office Suite is Routledge’s latest outing with Bennett in a working relationship that began a quarter of a century ago. It could have started five years earlier, when she turned down a part in his play, Habeous Corpus. Despite this initial spurning, Bennett continued to quietly watch the actress he’d first seen in 1966 in the west end production of How’s The World Treating You?, a “wacky” play that “changed my life” when, as a direct result, in 1968, she appeared on Broadway in the musical, Darling Of The Day.
Cast adrift in a notoriously cut-throat American theatrical fraternity, she scooped a Tony award for a performance that was hailed in The New York Times as ‘the most spectacular, most scrumptious, most embraceable musical comedy debut since Beatrice Lillie and Gertrude Lawrence came to this country.’ Groucho Marx presented the award.
Following her smash hit success, Routledge was wined and dined by cigar-chomping impresarios desperate to buy a piece of her. She was offered her own show, with all the swimming pools and Hollywood trappings that came with it. When this gimlet-eyed arbiter of the written word asked to see a script, however, there were blank looks and presumably even blanker pages all round. Routledge came home.
On her return to London, Routledge appeared in the Noel Coward revue, Cowardy Custard, and released Patricia Routledge Presents, an album of standards penned by Coward and other maestros. She returned to New York in 1976 to star in Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a disaster, and she returned home once more. By that time, and, unknown to Routledge, Bennett was already penning both plays in Office Suite with her specifically in mind.
In 1982, Routledge appeared in A Woman Of No Importance, the prototype of Bennett’s phenomenonally successful series of monologues, Talking Heads. Alongside Thora Hird and Julie Walters, Routledge became a member of Bennett’s occasional ensemble of his favourite actresses as yet another office fuss-budget. In 1987, the first full Talking Heads series appeared, with Routledge cast in A Lady Of Letters. A decade on, she was cast in Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet for Talking Heads 2.
“Very dark,” the astonishingly sharp veteran of stage and screen observes of the sequel. “The emphasis had shifted.”
Routledge’s own concerns have also moved considerably over the years, and younger fans of Hyacynth Bucket and of her stint in Hetty Winthrop Investigates as the really rather old fashioned lady sleuth with the common touch, might be surprised by the depth and range of her back catalogue. They certainly were with Anybody’s Nightmare, the 2001 TV film based on the true story of a woman who served four years for the murder of her elderly aunt, but who was eventually acquitted.
Routledge has no problem with such image-shattering material. “For an actress who doesn’t particularly want to promote her own personality,” she points out, “acting is assuming another personality as best you can, whatever that might be.”
While Bennett is full of praise for Routledge as a foil for his writing, he’s somewhat gnomically observed that they “come from roughly similar backgrounds, although I'd say that she was rather higher up the social scale than I was.”
“Ooh, hello,” Routledge responds to a class-consciousness that is the foundation stone of great British comedy. “I was quite amused by that.”
Routledge grew up the daughter of a gents outfitter intending to become “an avant-garde headmistress with a red sports car who had affairs – romances – all over Europe.”
As it was, trips to the local music hall via freebies granted by its owners for putting posters up in the shop exposed Routledge to all the big names of the day.
“The power of the spoken word is what I love,” she says. “Language, poetry and drama were always enjoyed by my family. They could all quote Shakespeare and Tennyson.”
Routledge didn’t set foot onstage until studying English at Liverpool University, then fell into an unpaid job at Liverpool Playhouse, and, finally, aged 23, enrolled at Bristol Old Vic drama school. Years in rep eventually led to London, where the long road to Office Suite, via being voted Britain’s Favourite Actress in 1996, began.
Alan was very diffident about them being done originally,” Routledge says of the plays. “Because he doesn’t want them to be seen as period pieces. Also, he’s quite funny about his past work, because he wants to move on all the time. But they are period pieces, and we have to honour that. But Alan’s done what he’s always done. He turns cliché into poetry.”
Office Suite, Theatre Royal, Glasgow, June 11-16
The Herald, June 6th 2007
www.
ends
Comments