Actress Dame Siân Phillips returns to Cambridge Arts Theatre with ‘Summer 1954’
Dame Siân Phillips and Nathaniel Parker lead the cast in Summer 1954 at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, a unique, never-seen-before double bill by the British playwright Terence Rattigan.
Rattigan wrote The Browning Version in 1948 and Separate Tables in 1954, the latter of which includes Table Number Seven, and it is that and The Browning Version that make up this exciting, 1950s-set ‘double header’.
Dame Siân, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from Bath, the first stop on the tour, explains: “The second one is a full play, and ours, the first one, is a section.
“It’s a full section of a play called Separate Tables, but Separate Tables is a whole night in itself if you do its entirety, so we just do the one that fits in an hour, before the interval.
“The second one, which is about an hour and a bit, is called The Browning Version, and he wrote both plays quite close together.”
Dame Siân, who is perhaps best known for playing Livia in the 1976 BBC series I, Claudius and Marlene Dietrich in Marlene, for which she was nominated for Tony and Olivier Awards, reveals that Separate Tables was the first play she ever saw in the West End, back in the 1950s.
“I was taken to London as a teenager, I must have been about 19, and there it was – it was Separate Tables,” she recalls fondly, “so I remember bits of it vividly. We had very grand seats.
“Then I became a student in London and I didn’t get back into the grand seats for a very long time after that! I moved from the front of the stalls into the gods quite rapidly.”
A Guardian reviewer called Dame Siân’s performance in Bath “scene-stealing”.
“Really? Oh my goodness, well I don’t know about that,” says the Welsh-born actress modestly, “I don’t think I was meant to steal anything!”
Does this grand stalwart of stage and screen ever read reviews?
“No, I don’t, not at the time,” she says. “I might read one later, sometimes years later…
“I was remembering last night actually that I used to put them in manila envelopes and leave them in a pile. Now they’ve all been sent off to the National Library of Wales, I think. I haven’t read them yet.
“But some I would read when I moved house, which I do quite often. I would open them and, to my horror, I found that I’d made a great friend of somebody who gave me some really bad notices about 40 years ago!
“He never referred to them, he must have thought I was very charitable!”
Dame Siân says she loves the film versions of Separate Tables and The Browning Version.
The latter has been made into a movie twice, most recently in 1994 starring Albert Finney, a fellow alumnus of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), who the actress clearly remembers watching rehearse while they were both students there, albeit not in the same year group: “There was this absolutely mesmerising actor, I couldn’t believe it – he was so good”.
“They’re absolutely lovely, and I’ve seen the play [of The Browning Version] before and it’s just wonderful,” says Dame Siân.
“But The Browning Version is heartbreaking – I always cry at The Browning Version. I’ve seen the film of Separate Tables but I haven’t seen the play since I saw it when I was 19.”
The 1950s are often looked back on with a great sense of nostalgia by people who remember them, though the decade certainly wasn’t without its hardships.
Indeed, Terence Rattigan, who Dame Siân got to know in the 1960s, often focused his work on themes of sexual frustration, failed relationships, repression and reticence.
“He wrote these plays about the ’50s and they’re very, very accurate – that’s how it was, it’s very true to life,” she says, “and thank goodness that things have changed…
“He wrote quite a few plays which were meant to be written about homosexuals, and they couldn’t be performed in that way then, so they were performed as plays about heterosexuals.
“And even The Deep Blue Sea, which is very famous, was initially a love story but it wasn’t a heterosexual love story.
“So it’s really good now; I’ve seen quite a few of them that have been restored to their original, and we restore this one now.”
Dame Siân adds: “It [the time period] was very restrictive, it was very, very difficult [for gay people], life was very hard for them.
“And obviously I knew quite a lot of people who were gay and they had to live very, very carefully indeed – and that was a terrible thing, it was a shocking thing.”
Was it a more innocent time in other ways?
“No, I don’t think it was actually at all,” says Dame Siân, whose second husband was the legendary actor Peter O’Toole, star of such films as Lawrence of Arabia and The Lion in Winter.
“I mean some people believed it was; the way it seemed on the surface a lot of people, I remember, believed that was not the case – that life was not like that and oughtn’t to be like that.
“And it seemed there was nothing anyone could do about it. But I remember it – it certainly wasn’t wiser, I don’t think, or more innocent.”
She also notes that “people drank a huge amount more than they do nowadays” and adds: “It was a culture that was very, very different in that regard.
“But that’s just one thing… Tolerance, there was not as much tolerance – or if there was tolerance, it had to be concealed, so life was very, very hard for some people.
“But it’s true, more people drank in those days. They even drove drunk, there was no rule about not driving drunk, which is awful.”
The star says that life got “much better” as the decades went on. “I really enjoyed the ’60s and the ’70s and the ’80s more than I enjoyed the ’50s,” she reveals.
“Apart from anything else, the ’50s was a time of austerity and rationing and dirt and shabby buildings and not many clothes and not enough food.
“I remember I moved to London in the ’50s and it was all bomb damage and flowers growing on bomb sites and no restaurants and very little food.
“We had hardly any clothes to speak of… It was not an easy time to live in, although we didn’t know any better so that was it, we accepted it. That was how it was.”
The character Dame Siân portrays in the play is Mrs Railton-Bell, whom she describes as a “dyed-in-the-wool establishment figure”.
“She says what the current line of thinking is, that’s her stance, and it’s quite brutal. But things change in the play, I won’t say more than that now...
“I mean she’s of her time so she wasn’t a villainess, because she was just very much brought up in the old ways of thinking and that’s how she lives.
“I won’t say what happens to her but things, one hopes, don’t go quite her way, that that sort of thinking is over.”
Despite a long and successful career in film and television – her films of note include Under Milk Wood with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor and the Martin Scorsese-directed The Age of Innocence – Dame Siân, who has been coming to Cambridge to perform ever since she left RADA, says that theatre is her first love.
“It always has been,” she observes. “I like everything actually – I even enjoy doing commercials. I like all aspects of the film business but I’ve done more plays than I have anything else.”
Terence Rattigan’s one-act masterpieces Table Number Seven (from Separate Tables) and The Browning Version are paired for the first time and will be coming to the Cambridge Arts Theatre from Tuesday, 12 November, to Saturday, 16 November.
Tickets are available from cambridgeartstheatre.com, priced £25-£45.
