It's been a long road
from Beryl Battersby to Miss Havisham for Paula Wilcox. Yet, as the
Manchester-born actress arrives in Aberdeen this week to play the
latter in Jo Clifford's stage adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great
Expectations, both characters seem to be bookends of a sort on a
career which has seen Wilcox move from 1970s TV sit-com star and
household name to classical stage actress with ease.
Not that the still
youthful-looking sixty-two year old's career is over yet. Far from
it, in fact, if recent stage turns in everything from a musical role
in La Cage Aux Folles and playing an ageing rock chick in Stella
Feehily's play, Dreams of Violence, for Max Stafford Clark's Out of
Joint Company, to a new play by Jonathan Harvey at Liverpool
Playhouse, are anything to go by. It's just that, there's something
about the hopelessly romantic Beryl in Jack Rosenthal's still fresh
sit-com, The Lovers, in which Wilcox led Richard Beckinsale's
Geoffrey on a merry dance for two series in 12970, that could have
easily ended up as bitter and twisted as Miss Havisham.
“She's had a rather
terrible life,” Wilcox says of Miss Havisham in the
call-a-spade-a-spade northern English accent she's retained over her
forty-two year career. “She got jilted at the alter, and has never
forgiven man as a gender, and has been wreaking her revenge ever
since. She's a real mixed-up contrary bag of tricks, and what I find
phenomenal about her is that it's not just a great anger, but a great
sadness that's made her such an evil person.
“Part of her problem
is that she's so incredibly wealthy. So, unlike most people who have
to get a job, which might help them get over things, she's never had
to, so she's had all this time to indulge her mad desires in this
really self-indulgent fashion. This results in the tragedy of what's
happened to them all. As [Miss Havisham's adopted daughter] Estella
says, they're all beaten and broken.”
Great Expectations was
Dickens' thirteenth novel, and tells the coming of age tale of
orphaned Pip, who makes his way through society care of a secret
benefactor he presumes to be Miss Havisham, even as she makes his and
Estella's life a misery.
Graham McLaren's
touring production of Clifford's adaptation originated in a smaller
version at Perth Theatre itself. The script itself dates back to
1988, when Clifford wrote it for the Glasgow-based theatre in
education company, TAG. That production featured eight actors,
dancers and musicians, including a young Alan Cumming playing Pip.
Ian Brown's production went on extensive tours of India and the
middle east, something unheard of for small-scale Scottish theatre
companies at the time.
The current tour of
Great Expectations comes at a time when there is an ongoing flurry of
interest in Dickens' work. A three-part TV serial in 2011 featured
Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham, while a new feature film
adaptation by Four Weddings and A Funeral director Mike Newell will
star Helena Bonham Carter in a film which also features Robbie
Coltrane and Ewan Bremner. McLaren's production, now scaled up for a
cast of fifteen, is an infinitely more theatrical proposition.
“The script is very
clear,” says Wilcox. “Jo's jettisoned a lot of characters and
sub-plots, and focuses on the main story, from when Pip meets Estella
and dreams of becoming a gentleman. Whenever I say to anybody I'm
doing Dickens on tour, that doesn't sound too exciting, to be frank,
but the way it's done, as a memory play, with all these stage effects
and music and lighting, that's much more attractive and terribly
exciting to do.”
Wilcox's career began
as a teenager while attending The Hollies FCJ school, Manchester's
oldest grammar school. In-between entertaining her classmates with
impressions of the school's famed headmistress, Sister M Victorie
Murphy, young Mary Paula Wilcox found herself captivated by a school
trip to see Shakespeare's Henry IV Part One. Wilcox applied to join
the National Youth Theatre aged fifteen, but was turned down, only
being accepted on her second attempt two years later. It was here
Wilcox was spotted by Jack Rosenthal and producers from Granada TV,
who were looking to cast the lead in a new sit-com. By the time she
was eighteen, Wilcox had been given the lead role in The Lovers.
Rosenthal's writing
captured the conflicting social mores of the period perfectly, with
Wilcox's prim suburban Beryl sparring beautifully with Richard
Beckinsale's football daft and perennially randy Geoffrey, for whom
the promise of the permissive society remained frustratingly elusive.
Running to two series, each episode of The Lovers was a little
kitchen-sink playlet recorded in just one or two takes before a live
audience. The success of The Lovers launched both actors careers,
with Wilcox going on to even greater sit-com success in flat-sharing
romp, Man About The House, with Richard O'Sullivan and Sally
Thomsett. Both programmes were so successful that they were made into
feature films, and made everyone involved household names.
“I think I was a bit
embarrassed by all that,” Wilcox reflects. “I wasn't really that
comfortable with being recognised all the time.”
After leading one more
sit-com, the single mum-based Miss Jones and Son, Wilcox took
advantage of the doors her success had opened, and concentrated more
on theatre. This doesn't mean Wilcox has been completely absent from
the small screen, with Wilcox a series regular in latter-day sit-com
The Smoking Room as well as doing a stint in Emmerdale in-between
theatre shows.
“I've just gone with
my heart, really,” Wilcox says, “and what I've found as I've got
older is that I'm getting to play lots of weird and wonderful
characters.”
Miss Havisham is a
prime example of someone who could learn much from Wilcox's open-ness
to new experiences.
“I think she's learnt
what a tragic disaster she's made of her life and Estella's life,”
Wilcox observes, “and she's learnt that if she had her life over
again, she'd live it very differently.”
Great Expectations, His
Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, November 6th-10th
The Herald, November 6th 2012
ends
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