Feature: Theatre - Tennessee Williams's The Two-Character Play, Jermyn Street Theatre - Interview with actress Catherine Cusack
Published: 21 October 2011
by GERALD ISAAMAN
GROWING up in a family with a theatrical dynasty is not necessarily a help to your career, even in today’s overblown celebrity society.
“The name Cusack is a bit of a curse, and a bit of an advantage, too,” admits Catherine, at 41 the youngest of the highly professional Cusacks – father being the late Cyril, who made his stage debut aged seven, and his famed daughters Sinead, Sorcha and Niamh, all born to Cyril’s actress wife, Maureen.
“At the start, the name did help to pick me out of a line-up. Then you think you might get hit with harder criticism because there is so much to compare your talent with… and also that whole thing of ‘She thinks she’s great because she’s a Cusack’.
“I understand that, but, again, if I had just come out of nowhere, I simply don’t know what would have happened and where I’d be today.”
At present, Catherine, the only child of her father’s second marriage, is rehearsing with Paul McEwan for a West End fringe rare revival of Tennessee Williams’ illusionary and exacting The Two-Character Play, which had its world premiere, no less, at the Hampstead Theatre in 1967, with Mary Ure in Catherine’s role.
Even then the experimental play, about a theatrical brother and sister set in some kind of lost no-man’s land, received a mixed reception.
Critic Harold Hobson believed the audience ended up bewildered, while Ronald Bryden insisted: “It seems to me Tennessee’s finest work for a decade.”
Such a major production was at Hampstead thanks to the friendship between Tennessee and James Roose-Evans, the
theatre’s formidable founder, and it was playing on the same stage at Hampstead – in Bold Girls in 1993 – that was a significant moment for Catherine.
“Dad came to see it with someone,” she recalls. “I heard later that he said, ‘I think she can do it’. And that made me very happy to have his recognition.
“He was a tricky customer and, honestly, it was probably after his death that it was more natural and easier to be with my sisters, who have been so supportive, especially Niamh, who is nearer my age.”
Petite and bright-eyed, Catherine has her own sweet innocence, bravely confessing too that, apart from her past TV appearances in Ballykissangel and Coronation Street, she has hardly made a sustainable living out of acting. Having the family home to live in – and marrying successful film actor Alex Palmer – have helped to make the difference.
A shy child, she was hesitant about following in the family footsteps.
She set out to take a degree course in drama at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, but quit after a year to earn her Equity card as assistant stage manager at the Tricycle Theatre, in Kilburn, when a playwright friend of her father’s had a production there.
“I was very lucky in many respects,” she sighs. “My parents provided for me.”
One result was that she used to feel insecure about not having been to drama school.
Now, since making her stage debut in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, she has appeared in a kaleidoscope of film, TV and, in particular, experimental stage productions, the most recent with her husband in which they were trapped inside a Perspex box for the whole show.
The prospect of starring in a play by the author of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is welcome. “I am in the depth of wonderment and confusion, especially as The Two-Character Play is guaranteed to confound you,” she reveals. “I am lost in a fog at the moment. But that’s what makes it fascinating. And a challenge.
“One of my happiest-ever experiences was playing Laura in Tennessee’s The Glass Menagerie. I’ll never forget the spell that play casts. And I’ve sort of been a bit in love with his stuff – it’s so beautifully written – ever since.”
And performing now at the Jermyn Street Theatre, off Piccadilly Circus, also provides a poignant link with the Redgraves, another dynastic theatrical family. The celebrated Vanessa has long ago expressed her desire to appear in The Two-Character Play.
The current production will have a gala night on November 18 in memory of the late Corin Redgrave and be in support of his charities, Caged Prisoners and Outside Edge.
Is acting in Catherine’s genes?
“God, I don’t know,” she declares. “I look at the Redgraves and they’re all in the theatre. I suppose it is.
“But it is just as much nurture, your environment.
“Any family that grows up with one profession dominating through the generations, then they’re going to have a taste for it.”
• The Two-Character Play is at the Jermyn Street Theatre from Tuesday, October 26-November 20.
Box office 0207 287 2875, tickets £18; £14 concessions. Gala night £35
Pictured: Catherine Cusack and Paul McEwan in The Two-Character Play