When Hannah Waterman
invited one of her friends to come and see her play Beverly, the
suburban matriarch at the heart of Mike Leigh's 1977 devised play,
Abigail's Party, she asked her what they thought of it. “Oh,”
came the surprised response. “She's a sexy Beverly.”
“I thought she always
was,” says an equally surprised Waterman in her dressing room in
Cambridge on a tour of Lindsay Posner's production which arrives in
Edinburgh next week. “ She's massively sexually frustrated, which
is why she behaves the way she does when she gets pissed, but she's
in a very lonely marriage. There's this thread of loneliness that
runs throughout the play. They talk about nothing. It's all cars and
sofas, but that says so much about who they are.
“I play Beverly
fairly overtly sexual. She doesn't have sex with her husband. She
gets drunk. She doesn't have many friends. Her husband is sniping at
her all the time. She's aspirational materially in the way that her
husband is aspirational intellectually, but they're both
under-achievers, really. People say Beverly's a monster, but it's
more subtle than that. She's a really sad character.”
Beverly is also
something of an icon, and has been ever since Abigail's Party was
adapted for BBC television a mere six months after making its stage
debut, a speedy transition that would be unthinkable today. As the
title suggests, the play is focused on a gathering hosted by Beverly
and her estate agent husband, Laurence for new neighbours, Angela and
Tony. Also in attendance is Sue, whose teenage daughter is the
Abigail of the title, and who is hosting a far more happening affair
next door.
Out of all of this
comes a grotesque portrait of upwardly mobile Britain in the 1970s
that is the darkest of situation comedies, even as it predicts the
materialism of the Thatcher decade it pre-dates. Developed over
months of painstaking improvisation with a cast that included Alison
Steadman as an epoch-defining Beverly, Abigail's Party is also a
painfully human story.
“It's a play about
people's relationships,” Waterman observes. “We may laugh at
these people, but we all know people like them as well. Me and my mum
went to a health spa recently, and there were these three women by
us, all talking in a terribly nouveau fashion about sending their
children to private school, and getting things slightly wrong in the
way that Beverly does. These are very extreme characters in the play,
and you have to recognise that. When we started working on the play,
we tried playing it more naturalistically, but it didn't work. It
wasn't funny, so you have to try and get the balance, and try and
bring these people to life with all their eccentricities.
“We're certainly not
trying to imitate the TV version. Alison Steadman was pregnant when
she did it, and that made her walk and carry herself in a certain
way. I'm a lot smaller, so when the actor who plays Laurence comes at
me with a knife, he's a lot bigger than me, so there's a bit more
danger, and I hope that brings out a little bit of the vulnerability
there is with Beverly.”
Vulnerability is
something Waterman learnt much about during a four year stint as the
much put-upon Laura Beale in TV soap, East Enders.
“I was twenty-four
when I started on the show,” Waterman remembers, “and it was a
great place to learn about doing telly. At the time, East Enders was
at its peak, and getting millions of viewers in a way that doesn't
happen anywhere now.
“The year before I
joined East Enders was not a good one. I was working in Selfridges
selling wigs when I got the call. Being pretty strange looking, I've
never really played ingenues. I'm not a pretty actress. My mum says
I'm lucky to have such a curious face, which is easy for her to say,
because she was so beautiful, so I didn't go into the industry with
any false impressions.”
Waterman's mum is
former Royal Shakespeare Company actress, Patricia Maynard, while her
father is star of Minder and The Sweeney, Dennis Waterman. Watching
her parents, waterman knew she wanted to act from an early age, and
she joined the National Youth Theatre as soon as she could.
An early stage role
cast Maynard and Waterman as mother and daughter in a production of
Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, while Maynard also played Laura's
mother in East Enders. After leaving the programme, Waterman went
straight into the west end, followed by stints at the Stephen Joseph
Theatre in Scarborough.
“I really had to
fight my corner,” she says of the East Enders effect, “but doing
theatre was like soul food to me.”
It was while she was in
Scarborough that Waterman worked with Laurie Sansom, who has just
been appointed artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland.
That was in Soap, a camped-up satire of TV soap operas in which
Waterman proved to be a perfectly post-modern casting choice.
“Laurie is as bright
as a button,” Waterman says of Sansom, echoing many things that
have already been said about him. “He's also brilliant fun, so well
done Scotland for grabbing him.”
By her own admission,
playing Beverly in Abigail's Party is Waterman's biggest and most
challenging role to date. If things go according to plan, it won't
remain that way for long.
“I'd like to do a
sit-com,” she says. “I've done loads of comedy onstage, but never
onscreen, where I usually just stand around looking stern in a
trouser suit. I'd also like to do more classical parts. I did a
workshop of the old people's Romeo and Juliet with Tom Morris. I
played the Nurse, and it was just a pleasure to be around these
doyens of classical theatre who were all doing it. I've never done
anything with the RSC or the National Theatre, because you have to
get your foot in the door, and I've never managed that. I just want
to get better at what I do as I get older, because I love it. I don't
live to work, but I couldn't not do it.”
Abigail's Party, Kings
Theatre, Edinburgh, February 25th-March 2nd
The Herald, February 19th 2013
ends
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