 |
|
|
|||
|
Interviews
|
|||
|
|
As Ubiquitous as Domestos Sheila Connor talks to Maureen Lipman Maureen Lipman is presently performing at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in Charlotte Jones’s play Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis and the show is due to take to the road on 13th March for an eight week tour beginning at Woking, so we met at Woking to find out a little more about the show – and about Maureen.
Her achievements are so numerous and so varied that had we decided to recite a list we would have been there for at least a week. She is perhaps surprisingly best known for her character of the Jewish grandmother Beattie in the television commercial for BT, pleased when her grandson had achieved an ‘ology’, but her talents range much wider than that, taking in theatre, television and films, as well as having written several books and composing a regular column for the Guardian and Good Housekeeping. Her writing career is also shared with her son and daughter who, following in their father’s footsteps, have created several plays between them.
To add to the work overload she has just moved from her house in Muswell Hill to what she describes as a ‘funky bachelor-girl flat’ in central London, and there are still boxes floor to ceiling, but “I’m just trying not to panic, I’m taking it a day at a time and just enjoying that all the balls are in the air”.
Sadly her much loved husband, playwright Jack Rosenthal, died three years ago without finishing his autobiography which she has now managed to complete. I asked how difficult this had been.
“It was agony actually, but it had to be done because he’d given up. He said ‘nobody’s going to read it’. Maybe that was a premonition of the fact that he was going to go but it had to be finished. The difficulty was finishing it in the style in which he chose to write it, which was in the form of a play with him as the central character and I tried for a long time to do that. I did write one good scene between him and my mother when she was trying to get him to make her cheese on toast, and that wrote itself actually. You know we did that on the radio – and it was agony to listen to as well, although not to direct as I had to concentrate. So I had to finish it and it was cathartic. It’s amazing what you miss – it’s the seeing of the world through shared eyes.”
There is now a new love in her life in the shape of a delightful inquisitive year old Basenji puppy called Diva, and the interview was frequently punctuated with calls to Diva to “stop that” or “give me a paw – Good Girl” – little incidents which we all enjoyed.
“She’s just got to get used to being a theatre dog. Every time I go on stage she will pee in my dressing room. I’m warning the theatres now. Unless there’s someone in there with her – she’s never been left which is damned stupid of me” Another break to check what Diva was up to.
Returning to the play I believed it to be both farcical and deeply emotional and wondered how the two combined.
“I think most comedy writers would say they are erring on the side of tragedy when they write comedy. It’s very touching on occasions. We’ve had a lot of people saying that they’ve shed a tear, but we mustn’t think of it that way. It’s also very farcical – it surprises you all the time. It has a lot of heart, and it’s sexy – there’s even a bit of bondage in it, something for everyone I think everybody in it gets what they want and it’s full of optimism and good cheer. It’s mostly to do with Elvis, I have to say. Elvis is just an amazing creation – a Chinese Elvis. The audience just go mad – they want him all the time – the rest of us could just bugger off. He’s an actor, but basically he does an awful lot of Elvis impersonations”.
Lipman’s character is Martha, a deeply religious and repressed Irish Catholic, and a neurotically compulsive cleaner - never had a life, never had sex, depressed and dowdy, “I wear no makeup – I make my eyes pink and I’m twitching all the time”, but by the end of the play there is a transformation and, in full Spanish flamenco attire she even gets to do the tango.
This brought us on to her recent performance in Glorious! (where she also had to perform in Spanish costume) as Florence Foster Jenkins, a lady totally convinced that she could sing – a conviction not shared by anyone else - and it appears that this was a woman very close to Lipman’s heart and the only one she has ever really missed when the show was over. “She got into my blood – I felt so tender towards her”.
Is humour inherited? Was there a lot of comedy and repartee in her childhood? "Yes – both my parents were funny, but my dad was very dry and a bit of character. He had a shop (a tailor’s) and he used to stand at the door and everybody knew him. What a character he was! My mother was positively hilarious but she didn’t know why – she was a bit like Gracie Allen.!
She firmly believes that recently she has “been directed from on high” and everything in her life is falling into place according to ‘some vast eternal plan’. “If I hadn’t left my house in Muswell Hill I would never have met, seen, done all the things that have happened to me in the last ten weeks. I cannot write about it, it’s too soon, but it’s a great story.” Her newspaper columns have been like diaries and she would like to move on and write about “something which has not yet happened” but although recent events have been so spectacularly extraordinary – truth being so much stranger than fiction – she finds she cannot yet share her experiences. There could perhaps be a little romance in her life and we look forward to hearing about it when she is ready.
Time to go, and Diva took centre stage again. . “A dog is a tie,” she agreed, “but they also make you very optimistic. You can’t be too down when you’ve got a dog.” I don’t think there’s much chance of our ‘national treasure’ being down for long. “You know what that term means” she says, always one to laugh at herself, “that means someone who’s never going to be a dame – who’s always going to make people laugh - who’s as ubiquitous as Domestos”.
|
||
|
|
