Ican’t string a sentence together, it’s awful!” Sitting in a rehearsal-room cafeteria munching on toast and Marmite, Sally Phillips is protesting her unsuitability for interview. Whether this alleged inarticulacy is because she’s five months pregnant with her second child or because she is about to make her West End theatrical debut despite being, as she puts it, “a complete theatre idiot”, it’s hard to know. Either way, it’s very Phillips, delivered with great timing, half a smile and just a hint of edge. It’s also palpably untrue. This woman could self-deprecate for England.
It’s ten years since playing the giggling receptionist Sophie in
I’m Alan Partridge got Phillips noticed. There followed three seasons writing and co-starring in the Channel 4 sketch show
Smack the Pony. It made her famous. Playing Renée Zellweger’s sidekick Shazza in the two
Bridget Jones films took her into the mainstream.
But since she had her son Ollie in 2004 Phillips has scaled back the acting, while also working on the screen-play for a big-budget romantic comedy,
The Decoy Bride, that she hopes will be made this summer. Although, she says, she’s not well known enough to appear in it herself. “I’m back to the was-I-at-school-with-you? kind of fame,” she says. “People go: ‘Oh, didn’t you used to go out with Darren?’ ” But, as she self-mockingly reminds me, she’s here to talk Pinter, not private life. Phillips is part of the cast assembled by the comedian Bill Bailey to stage 14 sketches by Harold Pinter, spanning his whole career, from the 1950s to a two-hander from last year that he’s previously performed at dinner parties with his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser.
Phillips joins the cast of crack comedians, Bailey, Kevin Eldon and Geraldine McNulty, to form
Pinter’s People, a name given to the venture by the playwright himself after a nerve-racking private audition for him at the Arts Theatre in London. They then tried out the show at a theatre in Ilfracombe, Devon, just before Christmas. “So now we have a sense of how the pauses play in a comedy setting,” says Phillips.
Even so, all concerned know that it’s a peculiar venture. Pinter can be very funny when you’re not expecting it, but can he sustain a whole evening of comedy? “Well, they’re not all comic,” says Phillips. “And they’re all much deeper than your average
Smack the Pony, Catherine Tate sketch. They’ve got much more heart. I’m used to sketches where it’s obvious that there’s only really one or two ways you can play it. Here it’s much higher quality writing. You could choose five or six different ways to play it and they’d all be
equally good.”
Despite the apparently effortless comic poise that Phillips, 36, has shown over the past ten years, her theatrical experience has been largely restricted to the Edinburgh Fringe in the years between Oxford University and
Alan Partridge. She admits that she knew more about this show’s director – Sean Foley, of
The Play What I Wrotedouble act the Right Size – than she did about the playwright. So it’s probably a good thing that she made a deliberately low-key theatrical return 18 months ago, when she appeared in her best friend Erica Whyman’s production of
The Importance of Being Earnest at the Oxford Playhouse.
“Well, I don’t know if it was or it wasn’t. It’s made me afraid. I went in going: ‘Everyone goes on about how hard theatre is, how hard can it possibly be?’ Cut to me finding out that it was significantly harder than I imagined. But rehearsing this I think, well, it is sketches, it’s not like I don’t know how to do it. With the Wilde it felt like I was taking up a totally different sport.”
And Phillips, lest we forget, is a truly exceptional sketch comic. Over three series of
Smack the Pony, alongside Doon Mackichan, Fiona Allen and Sarah Alexander, she played a succession of wondrous weirdos and slightly screwy everywomen, with a unique mix of reticence and brio. In fact, if you look at the shows now, which ran from 1999 to 2002, their sheer turnover of characters and ideas is wonderfully nourishing in a sketch world dominated by the unashamedly regurgitative
Little Britain and
The Catherine Tate Show.
“Yeah, I’m really pleased we did that,” she says. “Not that it made a great deal of financial sense in retrospect. The first series of
Smack the Pony, I probably wrote two hours of material, an hour of which was used. It’s all I did for a year and it didn’t pay that well. Whereas if you just work out a character who says, whatever it is, ‘Oh no, I’ve spilt my tea!’, then that’s all you really have to do. But I don’t want to put down
Little Britain, I love it, I think they are really, really funny. I love the interplay between them whatever the sketch.”
Smack the Pony’s policy was to have no punchlines and no recurring characters. “It was a brief blip where that seemed like the sensible thing to do. Now it seems like idiocy. We could have had key rings! Key rings that quote your own writing back to you!”
Far from being brain-dead, as advertised, Phillips manages to be both friendly and unnervingly honed on the artificiality of the encounter. Whether from shyness, intellectual impatience or from previous bad times with the press – she read one 17-word tabloid story on her once that contained ten factual errors – she’ll articulate directly what she thinks my questions are groping for. When she owns up to the awkwardness of coming to boarding school in England, age 10, after growing up abroad – “definitely felt different, correct, Sigmund” – she makes such instant insights, often the smashing orangey bit in an interviewer’s Jaffa Cake, feel horribly banal. “Also felt like a bit of an outsider,” she breezes. “Classic comedy credentials. And got bullied. Classic comedy credentials.”
She says she feels most comfortable abroad now, or when she’s with foreigners, since then her outsider status is a given. She was born in Hong Kong and lived all over the world as a child, because her father worked for British Airways. “I obviously seem very English, but I don’t feel very English.” Wherever they were, her family always had the World Service on. So she responds to the Pinter sketches, she says, in part because “they depict the England I thought I was coming back to, because I have a sort of 20-year lag.”
Her recent work includes the Jennifer Saunders television sitcom
Jam and Jerusalem, which she adores – “It’s the epitome of uncool, the very thing that ten years ago I’d say, I really hope I never end up doing that. But I really, really like it” – and, on Radio 4, the even blunter
Claire in the Community, a sitcom about a misanthropic social worker. Phillips admits that she isn’t always comfortable with the radio show’s old-school jokiness. But with that, as with everything, her goal is to tone things down: the more ludicrous the event, the straighter she tends to play it. “I had my comedy growing-up period with boys. I did nine Edinburgh Festivals, with Kevin Eldon and Stewart Lee and Boothby Graffoe, all these people going: ‘No, no, no, give it less, do it straight’. So that’s just the way I learnt to do it.”
Phillips lives in South London with her husband Andrew – who is not, as some press stories have suggested, a Bible teacher, but who works for a company that supplies internet services to ship
ping. But the couple are Christians and did meet in the pub after church. It’s this aspect of her private life that Phillips is most reluctant to string together a sentence about – she knows how obvious a target a Christian comic can be. “You are so aware of what people assume,” she sighs. “A gay friend of mine said when I started going to church, ‘Gosh, you’ve picked the one thing that’s even worse than being gay!’ So I sometimes feel a bit defensive.”
I’m not here to do a “Sally Phillips is bonkers Christian” story, I tell her.
“No, no. Well, that would be fair enough. I am a bit, that’s the thing. It would be fair enough. Hence not getting into a massive rage about the Bible teacher thing. We go to church, we’re very committed, we not only go – which is offensive to most people – we also believe it, which makes us, you know, triply offensive and massively stupid in the eyes of almost everyone.”
After pushing my luck a bit further, I offer to let the subject drop.
“Yes, I think that would be good,” she says with a smile, before offering one last well-formed sentence – an angle for this feature, no less. “ ‘The interesting thing about Pinter’s People is the marriage of highbrow and low-brow – says bonkers, Bible-believing Christian Sally.’ ”
Pinter’s People starts its four-week run at the Theatre Royal Haymarket (0870 3802003; www.pinterspeople.co.uk) on Thursday
