What sort of culture have we come to,” asks Penelope Keith, “when two phrases
are now pejorative? A ‘do-gooder' and ‘well-made'.” Sitting forward on a
comfy sofa at her local theatre in Guildford, Surrey, she gives a tortured
smile. “Isn't that dreadful? It's ghastly! If a few more people would do
good, there wouldn't be so many people doing bad. People should aspire to
being a do-gooder! It's the same as” - she adopts a dour, mopey tone - “‘oh,
the well-made play...'”
Penelope Keith is so like Penelope Keith that it's positively uncanny. Poised,
posh and happily opinionated, she's also unlined and energetic enough to
make it look as if barely a fortnight has elapsed since her TV heyday in the
Seventies and Eighties. Looking good on 67, she fizzes with just the sort of
frustrations that you can imagine hetting up Audrey fforbes-Hamilton or even
Margo Leadbetter. Lazy thinking. Slovenly language. Shoddy diction. Factory
farming. Political correctness. All of these get a good kicking from Keith,
who also makes time to sort out my overflowing tea cup problem (quickly
locates a drip tray) and directs me back to the station (take the route by
the river) before I can protest.
In fact, her vitality dims only twice in our hour together. First she wilts at
the thought of “a handbag” - the locutionary landmine that awaits her
nightly as she plays Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.
Later she stiffens at the mention of the café that she and her husband,
Rodney, applied to build near their Highlands holiday home - which led to
one of the more bizarre news stories of last year.
For the moment, though, this proud do-gooder - she was appointed CBE last year
for her considerable work with local and actors' charities - is back in the
realm of the well-made play. It doesn't open till Thursday, but Peter Gill's
West End revival of Oscar Wilde's 1895 comedy is already doing great
business. Boosted, no doubt, by Keith's return to primetime in the Christmas
Day reanimation of To the Manor Born.
Her Lady Bracknell - a second stab at the role after a Nineties production
that she wasn't happy with - will disappoint anyone expecting a cartoon
battleaxe. Keith's Lady B is domineering, forthright, funny - but no
monster. “One of my tenets of acting,” she says, “is that you don't have to
act what people say. Everyone seems to take the one line that Jack says -
‘She's a Gorgon. I don't know what a Gorgon is, but she's a Gorgon.'
“But that's because she's giving Jack a hard time, that's all. She's clever,
she's the matriarch, she's a strong woman, she's witty - God, she's witty -
she says what she thinks. At a time when people didn't. She was in a
position of power. And surely if you're really powerful, you don't need to
throw your weight around.”
So no need to insert Edith Evans-style pyrotechnics on the handbag line. “Yes,
it is a landmine. I can't think of any other play in which there is one word
that is like a monkey on your shoulder. You go in a shop and ask for a
handbag, they still say: ‘Oh, a haaandbaaag!' It's in our culture. At least
it happens so early on, so you get rid of it.” She laughs heartily. “Oh
dear.”
Sitcoms made her a star, but Keith has never been away from the stage for more
than 18 months. Even as they recorded the first series of The Good Life in
1975, she and Felicity Kendal were still appearing in The Norman Conquests
in the West End. And watching her in the regional tour of Earnest late last
year, there was no escaping just how good she is at her job. She pitches
lines to the crowd but doesn't sell her character short. She doesn't just
say the lines, she organises a day trip for them. An unnatural activity
looks like second nature. And all this despite, on the day I saw her, having
the flu.
She got through it, she says, with grim determination and “copious glasses of
water hidden all over the set”. For Miss Keith is old-school and proud of
it. “The most important thing is not what I feel,” she says, “it's what they
feel. This is what I always say to young actors. I couldn't give a toss what
you feel when you're killing Macbeth, it's what they feel. You're telling a
story, that is you're function, whether it's Hamlet or Earnest or a darling
Ray Cooney farce. In our self-centred, egocentric age, actors internalise
too much. They forget that there are people out there who paid a king's
ransom to come and see them.”
So don't expect Keith to be in her dressing room thinking through a tragic
background for Lady B while the action continues without her in Act II. A
crossword, perhaps?
“Sudoku,” she says. “I can just about do Fiendish now.” And does she then
think her way back into Victorian high society for Act III? She shakes her
head. “Oh no. It's acting. It's not being. It really isn't being.”
Keith's own background was, if not exactly tragic, then at least less gentle
than her air of market-town magnificence suggests. She was raised in
Clapham, South London. Her father left her mother when she was 2; she didn't
get on with her stepfather. When she was 6, she started boarding at Seaford
Convent School. Terribly young to be sent away, wasn't it? Keith waves away
any such bellyaching.
“I get so boooored nowadays,” she exclaims, “with everyone exposing themselves
and saying the reason for this and the reason for that is that when I was 2
I was hit by a worm or somesuch. I was turned down when I went to Central
for my audition when I was 16; they said I was too tall. I thought, what am
I going to do about this? But then I went to Webber Douglas, where I had a
super time. Somebody said to me, you succeed in spite of your drama school,
not because of it. And I believe you succeed in spite of your life, not
because of it. I'm a glass half full person. End of story.”
She realised she had a knack for comedy during her time in rep in the Sixties.
Alan Strachan, who has directed Keith in several plays, most recently
Entertaining Angels in 2006, suggests that this experience underwrites much
of Keith's approach. “She's a worker,” he says. “She really does her
homework. And if she doesn't think something is right, she'll say so. But
I've never had diva behaviour from her. If you've been in rep, you just get
on with it.”
She got on with it to decent success until The Good Life came along and made
her a star. Keith can do hauteur standing on her head, but she also found a
wonderful vulnerability in housewife Margo's lack of humour: “It was just so
loveable.” And when, three seasons in, Margo announced herself in one
fraught exchange with a council clerk as “the silent majority”, a chord was
struck. “I got floods of letters saying, yippee, you said it, hurrah! One
suddenly became the voice of so many people.”
Shunning approaches to her and Paul Eddington to star in a spin-off series,
she went on to play the displaced aristo Audrey in To the Manor Born, which
pulled more than 20 million viewers when it ran between 1979 and 1981. But
the one-off comeback at Christmas, which reunited Keith with Peter Bowles
and Angela Thorne, looked horribly dated. The acting was spirited, I
suggest, but the writing was clunky.
Keith plays a straight bat. “Difficult, isn't it, 26 years?” But how did she
think it turned out? She rallies. “Well, I haven't seen it, so I can't tell
you. It's too close - I just think: ‘Oh, my hair looks bad,' or, ‘Why did I
wear that dress?' There were one or two things that I thought were terribly
funny when I read the script, I must say. It was just bizarre, it was déjà
vu. It was fun to do.” There are no plans for the Manor to be reborn again.
Keith is married to Rodney Timson, whom she met while appearing in a play in
Chichester in 1976. He was a policeman, twice divorced, four years younger
than her, assigned to the theatre. Tabloid attention ensued. These days he
looks after his wife's business affairs - though she guffaws at the
suggestion that he's her manager - and has a bit of a reputation for his,
er, uncompromising language. Keith smiles. “I think he says an awful lot of
what people would like to say. No, he doesn't swear all the time. He does
occasionally at journalists, but he had a very bad time early on - I mean,
chasing him while he was doing his job is not on, is it?”
Timson and Keith's latest brush with Her Majesty's Press has been over their
proposed café in Avoch in the Highlands. Keith sighs. In the autumn, it was
reported that her plans to open a cafe had met opposition from a local
petition: “The Good Strife”, as The Daily Record had it. But it turned out
that some of the names on the petition were dead, while others included
supporters of the plan. Further investigation revealed that people had
signed the petition in the Post Office, where it had been billed as a call
to “Save our Highland post offices”.
Keith details the case with grim amusement, but won't speculate on what
inspired this crusade against her. “I just say: ‘Roddy, you get on with it,
darling, that's your little baby.'” But has she had businesses before? “No.”
She wouldn't have worked in the café herself? She smiles indulgently. “I
don't think so. My husband does lots of things like that. He likes doing
businesses.” Ah. But he does it in the name of Pencon, the company that they
own together - so it's her name that gets used by the likes of me? “'Twas
ever thus,” says Keith, with a fixed smile. Last week they heard that they
have been refused planning permission: “We are considering our position,”
Timson says. We move on.
She is sensitive enough to avoid the more bull-in-a-china-shop elements of
Audrey, but she can be pretty full-on. Even her family - she and Timson
adopted two young brothers in the 1980s - can find her energy a bit much,
she says. She's an unfettered conversationalist in the same way as she's a
performer who can hit her lines just that bit harder, and better, than you
expect. But she has a sense of enjoyment about her that enables her to be
playful as well as forceful. “Yes, whether it's Rattigan or Shaw or Wilde, I
want to please them. Not ‘oh, do love me, love me, love me, love me'. I just
want to control the audience, give them an experience.”
So what might be didactic from someone else plays life-affirmingly from Keith.
She can get steamed up about duff diction and be funny at the same time:
“It's not about class,” she says firmly. “We have an Old Etonian and an Old
Harrovian playing Jack and Algie. And they still had to be taught to speak.”
She screams at the Today programme every morning: “All those wonderful nouns
being made into verbs.” She hates black-and-white thinking - “People say:
‘Oh, you like animals, I suppose you don't like people.' Bollocks! I like
animals and I love people.” Has she been approached by the producers of
Grumpy Old Women? She has. “But I'm an actress, not a turn.”
Is she pigeonholed into appearing in crowd-pleasing classics? No, she says,
she does the plays she does because good writing - really good writing - is
hard to find. Not many people can cast a line like Coward or Rattigan or
Wilde. And not many people can take those lines from the page and make them
fly through the air with the greatest of ease.
“Often when I see things, I think: ‘Oh God, there's so much acting here.' Why
do people think if you're an actor you have to act? I loathe acting. I want
to believe that that person is that person, that's what it's about. That's
what I hope to achieve. That people believe that that's me up there.”
The Importance of Being Earnest is previewing at the Vaudeville Theatre, WC2
(08444 124663), and opens on Thursday.
Click
here to buy tickets for The Importance of Being Earnest
