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Prunella Scales |
Secrets of Prunella's lunchtime monologues
Tom Foot talks to Prunella Scales about her forthcoming one-person role at the King’s Head
IT is hard to think of Prunella Scales without conjuring up images of Basil’s shrewish wife Sybil in the classic comedy Fawlty Towers.
The Torquay hotel is lodged firmly in the British canon, and regularly jostles for position with Only Fools and Horses as the nation’s greatest sitcom.
But Ms Scales has plenty of other strings in her bow after a successful career on both stage and screen. Now Ms Scales – whose first break came in the 1960s sitcom Marriage Lines with Richard Briers and who was awarded a CBE for her services to drama in 1992 – has taken a step back in time to a world of fringe theatres and shoestring budgets.
She plays the lead in a series of lunchtime monologues in Islington’s King’s Head.
Gertrude’s Secret, written by Scales’s “second cousin once removed” Benedick West, will be a make-or-break revival of the format popular in America but virtually unheard of this side of the Atlantic.
The writer’s 12-year-old daughter Jerusha West also performs but Scales is adamant the show is more than just a family affair.
Ms Scales says: “Benedick’s writing truly amazed me. Critics often dismiss one-person shows, especially in a fringe theatre, but I feel they have the potential to be more powerful. It is an intense experience and a marvellous opportunity for me to reach out to the audience and to experiment.”
With a distinguished cast for the series – including Frank Bourke from Ken Loach’s recent The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Rose Keegan from Woody Allen’s Match Point and Richard Leaf from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – the acting bar will be high.
Ms Scales married actor Timothy West in 1963 in what she recalls as a golden age for British actors. She remembers touring the world with her husband performing Shakespeare in productions subsidised by the Arts Council in the 1970s.
Times have changed, however, and despite her son Sam West forging a successful career as a star of the screen, the production woes facing her distant relative Benedick seem to have brought Ms Scales back to earth with a bump.
Some behind-the-scenes gossip is telling. Meera Syal, of The Kumars at Number 42 fame, pulled out of the production after winning a part alongside James Nesbitt in a television adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There was no clash with filming, according to Benedick who was left in the lurch having to scrap thousands of fliers with her name printed on them.
The financial pull of a television series compared to 10 afternoons in the King’s Head is a no-brainer. But the refusal of successive governments to up public subsidy for fringe theatres and struggling actors is outrageous, according to Ms Scales, who launches into a stinging attack on the funding crisis gripping small-scale productions.
Maybe it’s the dentist appointment she has just returned from, maybe the thought of Basil Fawlty down the bookies has just crept into her mind, but she appeared to lose her off-screen affability and she almost seems angry.
She says: “Live theatre is grossly underfunded. Did you know this government pays less per capita towards the performing arts than any other country in the EU? I do not understand how a country whose language is spoken across the world, which has such a thrilling dramatic heritage, and so many young people interested in it, chooses not to invest.
“Tim and I used to tour the world for the British Council performing Shakespeare. But this is not a personal quibble – I was very lucky to have a career in television – but there is no way I could earn enough to get by as an actor. They end up becoming their own subsidising body. We need more robust funding.”
Ms Scales, a confirmed socialist who counts former Labour leader Neil Kinnock among her friends, put her face to a party political broadcast for Tony Blair’s re-election campaign in 2005.
But despite her loyalty to the Labour Party she does not hold back in criticising New Labour’s attitude to the arts.
She says: “Margaret Thatcher’s government was less supportive of the theatres – that is when the problem began – but this is something that Labour governments have failed to address properly. I still of course support the Labour Party – I cannot imagine anything inducing me not to vote Labour – as a citizen or an actor.”
The cuts in subsidy are all part of a society on the wain, according to Scales, who believes, oddly given her career path, that sport and music should take precedence over drama classes in education.
She says: “It is more important for children to learn sport and music than how to act at school. For kids to learn an instrument and to play and to sing – music is more important educationally. To play sport, to canalise that energy and to learn to pass to ones peers, is essential.
“I believe the problems of kids on the street is to do with superfluous energy. I learned the piano as a child, although I played it badly. But my son learnt the violin, trumpet, cello, trombone and then moved on to the bassoon. He made Grade Eight in a year and is now a top bassoonist.”
So pack your lunch and head to Upper Street. Gertrude’s Secret is on for a three-week run.
• Gertrude’s Secret A series of Monologues by Benedick West
King’s Head Theatre
0207 226 1916
Until October 15
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