The Daily Telegraph - 23.08.2019

‘I don’t think

theatre

should be

preachy’

Actress Lindsay Duncan’s new play tackles

snobbery and homophobia – but its first

duty is to entertain, she tells Ben Lawrence

imply that the request was to show a

bit more cleavage] and then I got back

from work to my then-boyfriend and I

just burst into tears. It never occurred

to me to say no because the

programme was all about innuendo

and I was playing this buxom sort of

character... But to have to lean

forward like that was so distressing.

“But I did see Frankie Howerd in

action so that was fun. I’m actually

quite proud of that show.”

Further Up Pompeii is an odd

footnote in a career that has been

defined by classical theatre roles and

Arts

A dignified performance of Elgar’s

swansong from charming cellist

B

irmingham’s finest scored a

coup, when they bagged cellist

Sheku Kanneh-Mason, the

country’s hottest young classical star,

for last night’s Prom. Since winning

the BBC Young Musician of the Year

Award in 2016, the first black

musician ever to do so, Kanneh-

Mason has become so ubiquitous it’s

hard to remember that he’s still a

student at the Royal Academy of

Music.

Last year he was seen by hundreds

of millions when he played for the

wedding of the Duke and Duchess of

Sussex. He’s played for the British

Academy Film Awards – twice – and

his debut album shot to number one in

the classical albums chart. He has a

massive fan base in America, partly

because of his arrangement of Leonard

Cohen’s Hallelujah.

And yet, when he came on stage to

play Elgar’s Cello Concerto, Kanneh-

Mason seemed untouched by all this.

He was still the perfectly self-

possessed, modestly charming young

man who won the competition three

years ago. Some young (and indeed

not-so-young) players play to the

gallery in this piece, wringing every

drop of nostalgia and introspection

from what turned out to be Elgar’s

swansong. Kanneh-Mason refused to

go down that route, instead offering a

dignified, almost reticent

performance. The moments when the

cellist had to soar up to a ringing top

note were poised and massively

confident, and in the dancing scherzo

Kanneh-Mason found a winning

lightness. He and conductor Mirga

Gražinytė-Tyla are old partners,

having worked together on Kanneh-

Mason’s debut recording of

Shostakovich’s 1st Concerto, and the

rapport between them was palpable.

So there was much to praise, but in

avoiding the pitfall of striking a

self-pitying note – always a danger in

this concerto – both soloist and

conductor perhaps went too far the

other way. Gražinytė-Tyla in

particular seemed a little clipped and

unbending, and Kanneh-Mason could

have responded more to the

heartbroken quality of the concerto’s

final pages. It’s a hard balance to

strike, and Kanneh-Mason will surely

find his own way of striking it, as the

years pass. In the meantime we can all

enjoy a talent in its springtime –

revealed here not just in the concerto

but also in the encore, a beautifully

inward performance of a Prelude by

that wonderful and grievously

overlooked Polish-Jewish composer

Mieczysław Weinberg. It prepared us

for the closing piece, Weinberg’s

bittersweet, innocent and yet ironic

3rd Symphony, which here received a

performance of surpassing delicacy

and refinement.

Prom 45

City of Birmingham

Symphony Orchestra

Royal Albert Hall, London SW7

★★★★★

By Ivan Hewett

Still learning: Sheku Kanneh-Mason

W

hen you think of

Lindsay Duncan,

you tend to think of

her roles in which

she expertly

deploys a sort of

elegant froideur. As the Marquise in

the RSC’s landmark adaptation of Les

Liaisons Dangereuses, she was icily

composed while hinting at erotic

possibility. On TV in Alan Bleasdale’s

GBH, she played Barbara Douglas, a

mysterious woman in possession of a

dazzling array of sunhats with the

potential to corrupt very corruptible

politician Michael Murray – all it took

from her was a short, elliptical

sentence uttered in a low, beautifully

modulated whisper.

So it’s odd to find that, in the flesh,

Duncan – while reassuringly elegant

• is someone whose emotions are very
  close to the surface. We meet in a back
  office at London’s National Theatre to
  talk about her new play, Hansard, and
  almost immediately her rich and
  rather soothing voice starts to tremble.
  “This means so much to me,” she
  says. “This play is about important
  stuff about inclusivity and tolerance
  and it is written in a way that will
  make people listen. I want it to speak
  for itself and I will do my damnedest to
  make that happen.”
  Hansard, written by the former
  actor Simon Woods, is ostensibly a
  portrait of a marriage in decline as
  Diana (Duncan) and her husband
  Robin (Alex Jennings) – an articulate
  couple with an emotional deficit – turn
  their relationship into a sort of blood
  sport within the comfort of their
  capacious Oxfordshire home.
  But it is also political and this, it
  seems, is the cause for Duncan’s
  emotional commitment. The play is set
  in 1988 and Robin, a Tory MP, is
  supporting his party’s enactment of
  Section 28, which stated that no local
  authority could promote
  homosexuality, including the teaching
  “of the acceptability of homosexuality
  as a pretended family relationship”.
  Duncan, whose star was ascendant
  at the time, remembers it well. “My
  closest friends were gay and I
  remember the anger, the disbelief. I
  mean, it was unbelievably crude...
  “For me and for friends, it has never
  lost its potency. It’s like the clanging of
  a bell of doom. It seems incredible to
  me that people would be marginalised.
  No,” she pauses. “More than
  marginalised. Excluded, treated with
  cruelty. And yet the blinkers are back
  on, aren’t they?” Duncan is referring, I
  guess, to the recent LGBT row in
  certain schools where the

normalisation of homosexuality has

met with vituperation from several

quarters, including those who say it is

intolerant of Islamic beliefs. It is a

tinderbox, for sure, and Woods, who

started working on the play long

before the row erupted, couldn’t

believe its accidental resonance.

“It is awful watching current events

catch up with the events of the play,”

he tells me. “When I was starting on

this, one of the responses was that I

was rehashing a dead argument. ‘We

have moved on. Progress has been

made,’ they said. There is a strangeness

and sadness to seeing Section 28

become relevant again.”

Hansard is also about class. Robin is

a clubbable old Etonian; Diana is a

rung or two further down the social

ladder. “All of the pernicious subtleties

of the English class system has led to

this tiny little dent in her confidence,”

says Duncan.

There are parallels, too, with

Margaret Thatcher (whom Duncan

played in a 2009 TV film), who is

regarded with a sort of disdain by

Robin on account of her modest

upbringing. Sneeringly, he suggests

that she had to study hard because it

was the only possible way she could

enter the corridors of power.

Although politically far removed

from Thatcher, Duncan has sympathy

with her outsider status and how she

was viewed by certain members of her

cabinet.

“To some of them, it was like she

didn’t exist because she wasn’t the

right class or gender – this grocer’s

daughter from Grantham. I find that

pretty chilling, actually. And in the

end, they threw her overboard, didn’t

they? They were ruthless.”

People wrongly assume Duncan is

posh. She was born in Scotland in 1950

GEOFF PUGH

CHRIS CHRISTODOULOU

to a working-class Glaswegian father

and mother from Edinburgh. She was

mostly brought up in Birmingham

where, she says, her mother did her

utmost to ensure that now-famous

articulation of vowels. “She just

wouldn’t have tolerated a Brummie

accent,” laughs Duncan.

“She was so hot on education, and

looking back now I find it very moving

that my mother was determined I

should learn to spell and to speak

properly but, at the same time, allow

me the freedom to do whatever I

wanted. When I decided to become an

actor, there was no sense of ‘But I

thought you were going to be a doctor’.”

Duncan admits she was lucky. She

attended Bristol Old Vic drama school

and didn’t have to pay a penny. Now,

things are rather different, with many

gifted students from less well-off

backgrounds deterred by the

prohibitive fees.

“It’s really not good,” she says. “If

any area needs to be properly

representative, it is the arts. It is

important that we have writers,

directors and actors who come from a

broad range of backgrounds.

Everybody matters.”

Early on, Duncan tells me, she didn’t

really know what she was doing, that

she “padded on without a huge

amount of confidence”.

Certainly, her first TV role – as a

character called Scrubba in Frankie

Howerd’s ribald comedy Further Up

Pompeii – was a baptism of fire.

“At the photocall,” she recalls, “I was

asked to lean forward a little bit

[Duncan makes a little gesture to

Hansard is at the National Theatre until

Nov 25. Tickets: 020 7452 3000;

nationaltheatre.org.uk.

It will be shown live in cinemas on Nov 7;

ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk

See this Prom on Sunday on BBC

Four, and for 30 days thereafter on

the BBC iPlayer, and listen for 30

days on BBC Sounds. The Proms

continue until Sept 14. Tickets: 020

7070 4441; bbc.co.uk/proms

high-end modern drama (Harold Pinter

was a friend – “Harold had a very soft

spot for actors and to see him in the bar

afterwards was to see a happy man”),

quality TV dramas (she is an acolyte of

such auteurs as Alan Bleasdale and

Stephen Poliakoff ) and the odd movie

hit (such as Le Weekend, a lovely,

slow-burning drama of 2013 in which

she and Jim Broadbent played an

academic couple in late middle age

trying to rejuvenate their failing

marriage). It’s a diverse CV, and I

assume that Duncan has had the career

that she wanted.

“Well, I could never have anticipated

it. But now I don’t have any specific

ambitions. I mean, I gently think about

what I want to do, but I think in terms

of life and work now. I know I want

more breathing space.

“People still think of me as a theatre

actress but I am not going to be doing

eight shows a week, maybe ever again.

But I have no agony about that.

“I sometimes think, ‘Yes, I want to do

a new play’, but the truth is I have done

an awful lot. I don’t have that appetite

anymore because I find it costly now, as

well as thrilling and fulfilling.”

We should treasure her performance

in Hansard, then. Several films are due

for release within the next few months,

including Blackbird, a drama about a

terminally ill woman starring Kate

Winslet.

Duncan seems happy, contented

almost (she plans to do some travelling

with her husband, fellow actor Hilton

McRae, with whom she has a grown-up

son), but one can’t help thinking that

British theatre will be poorer without

her, not only for her performances but

particularly her passion for its place as

an arena of possibilities.

“I don’t think theatre should be

preachy, it should be more skilful than

that. Like a Trojan horse carrying

important stuff inside.”

And does Hansard do that? She signs,

and again I feel a groundswell of

emotion. “It offers the chance for us to

see ourselves from the outside looking

in. At the moment we need every

possible way to take stock and

remember what is important in life.”

Elegant: Lindsay

Duncan; below in

Hansard, and top, in

Les Liaisons

Dangereuses

‘To some of

Margaret

Thatcher’s

Cabinet, it

was like she

didn’t exist

because she

wasn’t the

right class or

gender’

The Daily Telegraph Friday 23 August 2019 ** 25

RELEASED BY "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws