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Interviews
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Elizabeth Mansfield - Infectious Enthusiasm Peter Lathan talks to the Olivier nominated actress, singer, and now producer. "I wanted to be a ballerina, which is why I went to Elmhurst Ballet School, but it became clear fairly quickly that this was not to be, and so I turned to another area of the performing arts, acting. However when I was about twelve the school discovered I had a voice, quite a mature one for my age, and so I began singing lessons, which I continued when I was at the Guildhall." That's how Elizabeth Mansfield's career began. Leaving the Guildhall, she went on to play at a number of rep theatres up and down the country: Stoke with Peter Cheeseman; the Pitlochry Festival, where she had her first string of leading roles; Colchester; the Thorndike in Leatherhead; the Sheffield Crucible; and a lot of work at the Leeds Playhouse. "In rep you did such a wide range of plays and there was almost always a musical in the season, so being able to sing was a big advantage to me." She was also in the original Godspell in the West End, first with David Essex and then with Robert Lindsay and Jeremy Irons. In the late seventies she became involved in the Red Ladder Theatre: "I've always been a political animal," she says. She was at the Leeds Playhouse at the time and Red Ladder moved to the city. She joined them initially for one production but stayed for five years. In 1980 she decided to have a child and while her daughter Sarah was an infant, trained in opera for three years at the City of Leeds College of Music. "It was possible to do it," she says, "because I was living in a collective house and there was plenty of support." It was while Sarah was still young that another member of Red Ladder, writer Steve Trafford, who is now her partner, wrote the show Marie, about the Music Hall singer Marie Lloyd, for her. They took it to the Edinburgh Festival and from there it went to the Drill Hall and then into the West End's Fortune Theatre, where she was Olivier nominated for Best Actress in a Musical in 1996. A national and USA tour followed. This was the first of a series of one-woman shows, which included Hymn to Love: Homage to Piaf, also written by Trafford, which she did first at the Colchester Mercury, then at the Drill Hall and which then went to the Traverse, Edinburgh, as part of the 1998 Fringe. Since then she has done a number of one-woman shows, as well as appearing on television and on radio. She was with the BBC Radio Drama company for eighteen months. Now she has formed her own company, Ensemble. "In Europe," she says, "the work of actors is valued, but in the UK and US you sit on a scrapheap waiting for the phone to ring!"
She opens in A Cloud in Trousers at the Theatre Royal Studio, York, on Friday 1st October where it runs until 23rd October. It's another of Steve Trafford's plays and is a co-production between Ensemble and the Theatre Royal. It's directed by Damian Cruden, artistic director at York, who, says Liz, has been a great supporter of the play, and has received an Arts Council grant to enable them to tour it to a further eleven venues until mid-December. It's about the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Poet of the Russian Revolution. Vladimir, Lili and Osip are living out a passionate and troubled ménage à trois. Outside three hundred million people are changing the world in the Russian Revolution. Inside, these three are trying to change themselves, by living out the revolutionary ideal of free love - sharing one another, without possessiveness, without jealousy. It's a tragi-comedy about sex, art, politics and love with an original score. "It's a play about the nature of art in society, about the possibilities of the new society at a time before Stalinism and the purges, when everything seemed possible, but it isn't really what you might call an historical play." Her enthusiasm for the play is infectious and she convinced me to see it when it reaches the Theatre By the Lake, Keswick, in November! But BTG readers will know more when J.D. Atkinson reviews it next week.
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