Dame Siân Phillips’ journey to stage and screen from a childhood in a remote Welsh village has been remarkable, and her long career has been studded with performance highlights, from Livia in the BBC’s 1976 I Claudius to the 1990s stage show Marlene. Melissa Blease catches up with Siân ahead of her appearance in Table Number Seven at Theatre Royal Bath.
Regal, distinctively rich, spell-bindingly mellifluous: the voice can only belong to one person – so I tell her that. “Really? Oh, thank you! I never think of my own voice much; I think I forget what it sounds like!”
But once we’ve heard it, we never forget who’s talking: the indisputable theatre-world legend and style icon Siân Phillips DBE, highly regarded for her ability to play a formidable range of roles whether quiet and passive or boldly authoritarian, subtly witty or fiercely wild.
This month, Siân will be returning to Theatre Royal Bath to lead an ensemble cast in award-winning director James Dacre’s brand new revival of acclaimed British dramatist Terence Rattigan’s one-act masterpiece Table Number Seven, presented as a double-bill in tandem with
The Browning Version (starring Nathaniel Parker) for the very first time.
“Rattigan originally wrote Table Number Seven as a much more overtly gay-themed play that premiered in London in 1954,” Siân explains. “The Deep Blue Sea was a gay-themed play too, as was much of Rattigan’s work. But homosexuality wasn’t acceptable – let alone legal – at the time. We’re doing Rattigan’s original version, which is wonderful.”
Siân’s character, however, isn’t so wonderful: the bullying, aristocratic Mrs Railton-Bell. “I don’t judge my characters – I just play them!” Siân laughs. “This one may be many things, but she’s certainly interesting. She’s been living in a private boarding house in Eastbourne, the like of which we don’t have any more, for several years. It’s rather posh – not a hotel, nor digs, but very nice, very genteel. She has a daughter whom she’s made very dependant on her, and she has very firm views on most things, including sexuality – and she’s certainly not backward in putting her views forward. Her fellow residents, however, are all very different in age, background and attitudes and when a critical situation arises we see all the characters’ various reactions to what has happened…I can’t really say any more than that, but it’s fascinating, it really is!”
Siân is already working her theatrical magic in bringing Table Number Seven to life; I can hear, in that voice, how commanding her Mrs Railton-Bell is going to be, and feel the tension in contentious conflicts-to-come. But is the drama an era-specific timepiece, or will the themes resonate today?
“It’s certainly relevant, but you have to bear in mind too that the script was written in post-war England, in the early 1950s,” she says. “It’s a very accurate reflection of those times and of course, it’s very, very well-written. Yes, the attitudes of many of the characters are very different to the attitudes of today – except, of course, some people are still prejudiced in all kinds of ways today, which is the one of the saddest things about the play: you hope people have changed, but you don’t know for sure that they have.”
And if I were to trust anybody to confidently monitor changes in the social and political climate over the past fast-moving decades, it would be Siân. Born in the tiny Welsh village of Gwaun-Cae-Curwen, Siân spoke only Welsh for most of her childhood, learning English by listening to the radio. She began acting professionally at the age of 11 and went on to extend her artistic boundaries across stage, film, TV and broadcasting work during a lengthy career that includes her highly-acclaimed, BAFTA award-winning portrayal of Livia in the BBC’s 1976 adaptation of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius to fiercely feisty Jessie in Calendar Girls by way of Juliet in Tom Morris’ Juliet and her Romeo at Bristol Old Vic, with starring roles in several musical productions and guest roles in iconic TV productions including Doctor Who fitting in seamlessly along the way.
But we’re barely scraping the tip of the Siân Phillips CV iceberg here; to read it in full, her two bestselling autobiographies Private Faces and Public Places are available as a single volume and make for fascinating reading. A very lucky 125-ish people moved quickly enough to grab a ticket for an up-close-and-personal encounter with Siân in conversation with Richard Digby Day at the Ustinov while she’s in Bath, but as that event is sold out, and even though I’ve read both of Siân’s autobiographies I have to ask my own burning question: is it possible to pick a Phillips’ Personal Pinnacle?
“There have been so many highlights, really; I’ve been tremendously lucky,” she says. “But on a personal level, stepping into musical theatre at the age of 40 was by far the biggest challenge I’ve ever undertaken. When I was a girl, straight actors didn’t do musicals – you weren’t trained for them, and you never made the crossover. By the time I was 40, the crossover was acceptable. But I was a middle-aged woman! It was tremendously difficult, and very chancy – it could easily have gone very wrong. But still, I did my first musical – a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Pal Joey – at the Noel Coward Theatre back in 1980; quite late in my career for a starter performance! Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered was the first song I ever sang in public. I thought the critics might laugh me off the stage; I was convinced it was going to be the end of my career!”
But despite her own low expectations, Siân was nominated for a Laurence Olivier award for Best Actress in a Musical – and a superstar chanteuse was born: Fraulein Schneider in Rufus Norris’ Olivier Award-winning production revival of Cabaret, the one-woman show Marlene (a tribute to Marlene Dietrich, written specifically for Phillips and directed by Sean Mathias), a collaboration with Canadian-American singer/ songwriter Rufus Wainwright – as a singer, Siân is as remarkably memorable, and expressive, as her speaking voice would suggest, and the multiple awards for musical performances that she’s accumulated since Pal Joey attest to that.
Talking of prestigious awards…
In 2000, Siân was awarded a CBE for her services to drama at the Queen’s Birthday Honours, followed by a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) 16 years later. What did being awarded such huge, formal recognition of her life’s work so far feel like?
“Oh, I was terribly pleased!” she says. “The DBE in particular struck me as something wonderful to have bestowed upon me. It doesn’t make a huge difference to my personal life; people who know me don’t treat me any differently at all. But it can come in handy for restaurant and hotel bookings, things like that, that’s all”.
I’m not so sure, however, that Siân would need to flaunt her Damehood for a restaurant booking in Bath. Having made her first appearance at the Bath Theatre Royal in 1990 when starring in Jane Stanton Hitchcock’s Vanilla (directed by Harold Pinter), she’s since revisited the theatre almost a dozen times, making her so familiar both with and to the city that she’s almost a local. “I absolutely adore Bath,” she says. “I have many good friends and many marvellous memories in the city, and of course the Theatre Royal is one of the most beautiful theatres in the UK. But I look forward to just quietly walking around the city again too, rediscovering it, taking it all in.”
What? One of the hardest-working, multi-tasking actors in the UK is looking forward to… chilling out? “I love my work, and I love being busy – that’s what motivates me!” she says. “I have plenty of projects lined up, which is wonderful. But I’’m also very lazy; I can do absolutely nothing for days. I love wasting time, I really do.”
I can’t quite believe that, of Siân Phillips. But who am I to argue? I really don’t want to mess with Rattigan’s Mrs Railton-Bell…
Summer 1954 (Table Number Seven and The Browning Version), Theatre Royal Bath, 24 October – 2 November; theatreroyal.org.uk