Next week a legend in a fish-scale shimmer will take the spotlight of the Gaiety Theatre and with a breaking voice sing of broken hearts and a broken life. Not Marlene Dietrich, but Sian Phillips. "Dietrich could stop traffic," an American painter who knew her in New York told me earlier this week. "Yet towards the end of her life she had become a sad parody of what she had been. To see Dietrich in concert was simply to wish you had seen her when she still had what it took."
Sian Phillips, who slips into Dietrich's skin as easily as into that glittering costume, still has what it takes. Her remarkable performance has had hard-bitten London critics outdoing each other in superlatives. "I've never experienced anything like it," my American friend said. "You don't feel you are watching an actress. You feel you are watching Marlene Dietrich." For nearly 50 years now Sian Phillips has been one of the English theatre's finest talents - not that she herself would put it like that. As her instantly recognisable voice proclaims, as it dips and soars like a viola, she is not English, but Welsh. (In 1993 she gave the Huw Weldon Lecture for the Royal Television Society, recording it in both languages.) Although music has always been part of her life ("there was no way you could grow up in Wales without playing the piano and the violin"), Sian Phillips never sang in public until she played in the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey in 1981. Sian Phillips has never recognised any barriers in her profession. She began her career as a child actress. At 18 she was a TV presenter and news-reader. Then there was the stage: Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare, Osborne, Bolt, Maugham. The smouldering passion of I Claudius, a milestone in television drama, brought her to a wider audience. ("I've only ever seen it once, but it's a very good visiting card all over the world. We hardly got paid anything at the time, and in those days there were no residuals. It's a bit irritating as in America it's never off. If I did get residuals I would be a millionaire by now.")
But musicals? No. "Nowadays you can cross over a lot but in the early days it just didn't happen. If you did musicals you didn't do plays and vice versa. And then what I wanted to do was plays." A quarter of a century after I Claudius, along came Pal Joey, and the idea for Marlene first took root. "I happened to be wearing a wig that I suppose made me look like her. At least that's what people said. They also said I sounded like her when I sang."
Fast forward 15 years to a production of Ibsen's Ghosts in which she played Mrs Alving. Directed by Sean Mathias, the adaptation was by Pam Gems who already had a play about Edith Piaf under her belt. In 1992, Gems had adapted the Dietrich classic The Blue Angel for the stage, which Trevor Nunn directed. It was an opportunity not to be missed. The team was in place and three months later they had a script. How close the show that hits Dublin next week will be to that original script, however, is anybody's guess. "It has been re-written something like 25 times," Phillips says. "With a brand new play of this unusual type - it's not a musical or a play or a concert - you can't just write it and hope for the best. I have to talk to people for two hours, so obviously it has to be tailored to me. " The play starts in Marlene's dressing room, as she prepares for a concert in Paris in the early 1970s. "She's in her sixties and it's not as easy as it was for her to be the most glamorous woman in the world. The play ends with a half-hour show which is the concert she had come to do." In the interim Marlene reveals herself in all her bitchy, imperious, seductive glory. As news of the project got out, so more and more people came forward with their stories - "people who lived with Marlene, from people who worked with her, and people she worked for. From individual anecdotes to whole scenes, whole situations".
"Initially when I get new material, I improvise on stage. There's nowhere else to do it." If it works, "Pam tidies it up". At times, Phillips says, it has been nerve-wracking. "Sometimes you forget which version you're doing and there was a period when it was very, very frightening. I was terrified."
For inspiration, an Phillips still returns to the original recordings. "Inevitably as time goes by it comes away from her and becomes me and so I have to push it back again."
Next week's visit to Ireland will give Phillips a chance to spend time with one of her children with Peter O'Toole, her daughter Kate, who lives in Dublin. "Coming to Dublin is a big thing for me," she admits. After Cape Town, where she has just been, the show was scheduled for Johannesburg. "When they told me it was going to clash with Dublin I said `Well cancel Johannesburg'. I have never played the theatre in Dublin, would you believe: I have done television there, I was married there, my daughter Pat was born there, but I have never played the theatre there. It's come a bit late in the day, so you can see why I'm not letting it go. "
Marlene: A Tribute to Dietrich by Pam Gems opens at the Gaiety on Tuesday