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Interviews
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Kaye Wragg - An Engaging and Intelligent Actress Ged Quayle talks to actress Kaye Wragg about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and acting on stage and TV. I meet Kaye Wragg in the Restaurant Bar of the Liverpool Playhouse, as the audience for that day’s matinee of The Seagull are filing into their seats. I ask her how rehearsals for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are going. “They’re going really well”, she says. “We’re into our third week now and I’m really enjoying it. It’s a really intense process, and Albee (Edward Albee, the playwright) writes such superb characters, he leaves you with so many choices to make. This has been a real journey of discovery.” I mention that I’ve seen a breakdown of Holly, Wragg’s character in the play, which states “weak stomach, bit dim”. Surely, I suggest, one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century gave her a bit more than that to work with? Wragg laughs. “A lot more,” she says. “Uncovering Holly has been like peeling the skins from an onion. Every time you think you’ve got her, new depths open up. It’s the same for all the characters, and it’s the reason that rehearsal has been so much a process of exploration; there are so many times when we’ve thought we’ve ‘solved’ the play only to find we’ve had to go back and change what we’re doing. When you’re rehearsing a play like this, you really discover just what an intelligent and insightful writer Albee is and just how far ahead of his time he was with this play. “Honey begins the play as a very repressed woman, who’s never really been allowed to grow up. I don’t want to give too much of the play away for anyone who hasn’t seen it but by the end Honey has changed, and I think Honey’s journey is one a lot of women will be able to relate to.” The play opened to audiences in 1962, shocking with its sexual content and (for the time) extreme language. I wonder if the play will have quite the same impact today. “Yes,” says Wragg, “I believe it will, because it’s about people, and relationships and how we lie to ourselves and the people around us to keep the masks up. And how those masks can come crashing down. I really believe that that’s universal and just as relevant for an audience today as it was 43 years ago. There’s a lot of humour in the play, and people tend to forget that. Parts of it are very funny, but there’s a whole rollercoaster of emotions here: it’s heartbreaking, it’s uncomfortable, it’s funny, and Albee’s Absurdism means that there are no easy answers, but there’s something here that I really think everyone can relate to.” I ask her what it’s been like to work with the director, Gemma Bodinetz. Wragg smiles. “She’s wonderful. I’ve known of Gemma for ten years now and I’ve been really looking forward to working with her. This is a play she’s wanted to direct, I think, since she began directing, so she knows it inside out and loves it, but she’s given us the space and support to really explore it, which is wonderful for an actor.” Over the past ten years Wragg has built up an impressive body of work, both on stage and television, currently appearing in Channel 4’s No Angels and ITV’s Wire in the Blood. I ask her if she has a preference for stage or television. “I love them both,” she says. “They’re both very different, but I do love them both. One problem can be that television is so time consuming; a single series can tie you up for two or three years, and I find that returning to the stage can be really nerve-wracking.” She laughs “I feel that if I leave it too long I’ll forget how to do it!” There seems little chance of that. Kaye Wragg is an engaging and intelligent woman, lucky enough to find a job in acting that she both loves and is very, very good at. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a genuine classic of 20th century Western theatre, worth seeing for that alone, but with a director of Bodinetz’ track record, and a cast of this calibre, this surprisingly rare revival promises to be rather special. "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" runs at the Liverpool Playhouse from the 1st to the 23rd April, 2005.
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