When Clare
Grogan takes the stage in Barefoot in the Park this weekend, it will be
something of a dream come true. The Altered Images singer and star of Gregory’s
Girl has always been a fan of Neil Simon’s New York-set 1960s rom-com, in which
newlyweds Corie and Paul navigate their way around the era’s social mores as
much as their new apartment. In Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s new co-production
of the play with the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, Grogan plays Corie’s scene-stealing
widowed mother Ethel.
“It's
really extraordinary and interesting and fun and scary and a bit overwhelming
and overall quite joyous to just have the opportunity to be doing it,” Grogan
gushes of the experience on a Valentine’s Day break from rehearsals. I have a
very clear memory of the first time I saw the film with my mum and dad and my
sisters, and have just loved it ever since, so I was genuinely thrilled that
someone was going to put it on stage.”
Grogan
expressed her enthusiasm on Twitter, and was surprised to receive a call from
her agent, who said PFT artistic director Elizabeth Newman wanted to talk to
her.
“We had
a chat on the phone, and then Elizabeth said, how would you feel about playing
the mum, Clare, and I went, I'd love to. I think the decision was very much
based on my circumstances at that time, because my dad had just passed away,
and I just suddenly thought it would be a really great way to reconnect with my
parents, I really did. I felt like, why am I being asked to do this? It's not
to say no, it's to say yes. I’ve moved heaven and earth to make it happen in
terms of other things that I was meant to be doing, but I just found myself not
able to say no, and that there was something going on with that.”
Grogan’s
gut instinct ties in with her reasons for falling in love with Barefoot in the
Park in the first place.
“I'm a
hopeless romantic,’ she says. “I was very young when I saw it, but I loved the
idea that that's kind of what married life would be about, that you'd have this
lovely apartment and true love, and also I just thought it was really funny. My
sister Kate and I, we used to have our own video, and we used to rewind that
bit where the mum falls down the steps again and again, and laugh harder and
harder every time.
“The
great thing about it is that on the surface, it seems almost quite like a
sitcom, like Dharma and Greg, or the best episodes of Friends. Yet, underneath
it, there’s layers and layers of other stuff going on, and that's the beauty of
it, because as we go through life, we don't wear our pain or our happiness all
the time. We're so good at masking ourselves, and I think Ethel is masking how
she really feels at this point in her life.
“She's lost her husband, and now her
daughters, who’ve left to get married, and she has to start this whole new
chapter in her life. Although Ethel is over the moon about that, she finds
herself living alone for the first time, and gets left behind, not knowing what
her role is in life anymore. She's been a great wife, and a really good mother,
and suddenly she doesn't know where she fits in.
“That
empty nest syndrome is a lot of mums and dads experience. They really don’t
know what to do with themselves, and have almost forgotten who they are. So,
for me, the journey is kind of Ethel not knowing who she is, but finding a
little bit of her youthful self again, and finding out that there are no restrictions,
and that it's only you that restrict yourself. At the time it was written, for
a woman of those years to make that leap was quite difficult. All sorts of liberties
were coming up for young people, but maybe not for her generation.”
It
feels like things have come full circle for Grogan. Having begun her career by
combining acting success with pop stardom at a precociously young age, as she
prepares for Barefoot in the Park, a new, she has also been fronting a new,
all-female line-up of Altered Images.
“It's
quite extraordinary to realise that this will be my fortieth year doing all of
this. There's something genuinely quite poignant about that, that I started out
in this place when I was a teenager with all this ambition, and it's not been
straightforward, because it never is. But I think have really held on to my
enthusiasm for something that has not always been my best friend. I've always
had work, but sometimes it's been tricky. And I just I think there's something
great about the fact that I'm simply still getting to do what I set out to do,
and not many people have that.
“I
started at the top, so there really was only one place for me to go for a
while. And that's when the real work kicked in, that's when I became a
performer in earnest, because I had to start again, almost.”
To be
doing Barefoot in the Park, then, is perfect, not just for Grogan, but for the
times we’re living in right now.
“I
think it’s a really weird environment we're living in at the moment in society,
and that’s kind of heart-breaking,” she says. “But doing Barefoot in the Park,
it's about coming back to the belief that people are quite nice, because they
are mostly, and I think we lost sense of that for a while. I think that we just
need to connect with the notion that ultimately most of us are looking for the
same things in life.”
Which
are?
“Love,
hope and adventure,” says Grogan. “That’s all you need, really.”
Barefoot
in the Park, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, March 12-March 29; Royal Lyceum
Theatre, Edinburgh, April 3-25.
The Herald, March 12th 2020
ends
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