With Pinter, Beckett and now Friel productions, actress Penelope Wilton has made her mark on theatre and film in London and Dublin over thepast few decades. She talks to Ian Kilroy
Ten years ago, she was described as "the thinking man's crumpet". What was I to expect then? A beautiful and - as the use of the word "crumpet" might lead one to think - a very English actress? Upstairs, in Dublin's Gate Theatre, Penelope Wilton sits patiently waiting for the interview; using the time, apparently, to learn her lines.
She's a veteran of screen and stage. Born in Scarborough in 1947, she has been associated - especially by Irish audiences - with the work of English playwright Harold Pinter. Her most famous film role was probably as the wife of South African journalist and anti-apartheid campaigner Donald Woods, in the 1987 movie Cry Freedom. Then there's the TV work: The Borrowers, The Deep Blue Sea, Ever Decreasing Circles, and of course the "Beckett on Film" project.Remember Wilton rocking to and fro in Richard Eyre's film version of Beckett's Rockaby?
Settling down to have tea and biscuits with her, the questions that come to mind are about her personal battles. How did she feel about not making it in Hollywood despite the exposure of Cry Freedom? And how has she coped with the difficulties of her profession and the toll it may have taken on her personal life and relationships? But first, the easy questions.
Childhood, for example. What about Scarborough? "I just happened to be born there, that's all." Her clipped answer suggests that she doesn't want to talk about anything that's not strictly professional. Maybe this is simply what they call English reserve? We quickly move on to theatre. Is there acting in the family?
"My mother was an actress for a short time before she had the children. Her sister was an actress and her brother was an actor, and her other sister married an actor. So it was sort of around, really. Yes."
Sticking to matters professional, she's in Dublin to play in a new Brian Friel work, a two-hand, one-hour piece called Afterplay, based on Chekhov's work and to be staged with a shorter piece - a Friel version of Chekhov's The Bear - in a single night of theatre, imaginatively billed as Two Plays After. These are new works, as yet unseen. But what of something we have seen: Richard Eyre's controversial and recently released biopic, Iris, in which Wilton plays Iris Murdoch's friend Janet Stone.
"I haven't a very big part, but the girls - Judi \ and Kate Winslet - are wonderful . . . I think it's a moving, very intellectually vigorous piece, which is not easy to do in the cinema." Richard Eyre, the film's director, is better known for his theatre work, especially at Britain's National Theatre.
Through their various associations - Rockaby, theatre projects, and with Iris - Eyre seems to be a regular colleague of Wilton's. "I've had a long association with Richard. I first worked with him in Edinburgh when he was running his first theatre and I was about 23 years old. I've known him for many years."
At 54, Wilton belongs to that generation of actors and theatre practitioners who came of age in the later 1960s and early 1970s. After training at what she describes as the alternative and progressive Drama Centre,Wilton graduated in 1969 into a British theatre scene where a lord chamberlain still issued or withheld licences for performances - banning those of a sexually explicit nature.
"A ban on homosexuality was still there. A lot of Edward Bond plays were banned," she recalls. Although this was towards the end of the heady days of the 1960s Royal Court, the theatre still circumnavigated the lord chamberlain by operating as a private club, staging performances for members. Wilton was a young actress who had cut her teeth in the rep theatre in Nottingham following her training in London.
The Drama Centre was a place where the traditions of European theatre held sway. Appropriate, possibly, for a francophone like Wilton, who went on to do a lot of European and European-influenced work in the theatre: Chekhov and Pinter; Pinter who is a playwright in the European tradition after all.
Wilton never seemed attracted to the US. Was that because the US never called her? Cry Freedom didn't go down in the US like it did in Europe. Possibly, she agrees; but she cites other reasons for not going Stateside.
"I'm entirely European. In any case, by the time I made Cry Freedom I was 38 - it wasn't like I was a young thing. And my life is entirely in the theatre, although I do make films over in England from time to time."
The years that followed that film seem to have been the most difficult in Wilton's career. Although still unwilling to venture into matters personal, she is comfortable to relate that her lowest professional point came when she hit her early 40s, and she found it difficult to find work.
"That happens to actresses when they get to be a certain age. They're too old to be people's children any more and they're too young really to have grown up families, and that's when the interesting parts start coming again." Interesting parts, no doubt, like the one she is currently in rehearsal for with actor John Hurt. In Afterplay, Friel's preoccupation with Chekhov continues - the playwright having worked versions of the Russian master before. In the production, Andrey from Three Sisters and Sonya from Uncle Vanya, turn up in a café in the post-revolutionary Moscow of the 1920s. While loath to reveal too much of the play's plot, Wilton says that the piece is concerned with loneliness and what you need to carry on. "What's so really interesting is that Friel writes in an Irish idiom," says Wilton, "and I speak English, so it's like a slightly foreign language to me, although we have the same words. But there are certain ways of phrasing things that are very different. So I've had quite a lot of difficulty learning it." While this is her first time playing Friel, she is familiar with his work as a member of the audience.
She says Friel is "one of the best writers I've ever, ever, ever worked on; I'm delighted, thrilled to be doing this." The Greencastle master's reputation as a craftsman is confirmed by Wilton, who says that not a word has been changed in rehearsal, or, as she puts it, "there's no looseness in the writing". Her appreciation of working on a Friel production seems only rivalled by her memories of working with Pinter, who she describes as "the most generous and easy director to work with". Although much of her Pinter work has been on the British stage, Irish audiences will know her from the two Pinter Festivals held in Dublin over the years. As for the Friel at the Gate, the only other thing that she will say of the play is that its two characters "are not quite what either of them seem to one another".
To find out any more you'll just have to go along to the Gate theatre, where you may have seen Wilton appear in Landscape and Moonlight, in the first Pinter Festival over a decade ago. The more recent A Kind of Alaska, which played at the second Pinter Festival and at the Lincoln Centre, in New York, is the last time Dublin theatre audiences have seen her work.
But what about the thinking man's crumpet, as she was described in 1992? How does she feel about the description? She shrugs the shoulders of her slender frame, and smiles, now quite easily: no more of those clipped responses.
"I never read that interview. How funny. I wonder if I still am the thinking man's crumpet 10 years later? Hopefully I am."
Two Plays After by Brian Friel, opens at the Gate Theatre on Tuesday.