Lloyd Evans meets Niamh Cusack, who ‘absolutely wasn’t going to be an actress’
She doesn’t usually do it this way. When Niamh Cusack heard that the Old Vic was planning to stage Terence Rattigan’s final play, Cause Célèbre, she read a synopsis, found a part that excited her, and asked her agent to get her an audition. ‘I’ve never approached a production like that,’ she tells me. ‘But it’s a cracking play, really, well written — a rollicking courtroom drama with great characters and fascinating relationships.’
We meet in a dressing-room at the Old Vic and make ourselves comfortable amid the higgledy-piggledy apparatus of a Feydeau farce whose run is drawing to a close. On one side is a clothes-rail crammed with garish Victorian costumes, on the other a range of make-up tables strewn with cards and good-luck notes. Propped in a far corner, as if furtively signalling the true interests of actors, sits a battered old TV set with a black portable aerial pointing southwards, like the nose of a sniffer dog, towards the Sydenham transmitters.
The role Cusack coveted, Edith Davenport, is a sexually repressed Englishwoman serving on the jury in a sensational murder trial in 1935. ‘I felt I understood the soul of the woman,’ she says, although the only biographical similarity is that Edith, like Cusack, has a teenage son. Her campaign to get an audition began. Another actress already had the job. Then out of the blue her agent called with the news that the role had fallen vacant again. A meeting was arranged with the director, Thea Sharrock. ‘At first I voiced all the reasons why she shouldn’t cast me. I’m Irish and, although I’ve played loads of English parts, the stiff upper lip is not something I have instinctively. And Edith is so quintessentially English that I could see why they wouldn’t want me. But I really understood the heart of the role. That, I had for free. The rest, I didn’t have for free. But I felt we could put the layers on top. I was really game to try. And I think Thea said to herself, “Why not?”’
Niamh Cusack left Dublin at the age of 18 and has worked in this country for more than 30 years. Despite that accumulation of experience she felt a little daunted by the prospect of capturing the upper-middle-class accent of the 1930s (where ‘that’ rhymes with ‘Viet’), and she watched Celia Johnson’s performance in Brief Encounter as a model. ‘The accent is right back here,’ she says, indicating the rear of the mouth, ‘and I thought, “Oh, God, will I be able to do it?” But I love it. It’s very musical, and it’s very characterful. And we’re a family. Edith has a sister and a son, played by Freddie Fox, and we’re having a session together so the voice coach can check that the sounds are more or less the same.’
Freddie Fox, like Cusack, is part of a celebrated acting dynasty. Did that help when she was starting out?
‘It’s more advantageous than not. People are curious to see what the next generation are going to be like. So I think I got in the door for auditions. But they assume you have all the experience your parents have, which I really, really didn’t. And particularly now — when it’s so hard for young actors starting out — I think being the son of, or the daughter of, is hugely advantageous. But you have to work very hard to live up to your parents’ reputation.’
At first she had no intention of emulating her sister Sinéad and entering the family profession. ‘I absolutely wasn’t going to be an actress.’ She trained as a musician — flute and piano — and was employed for a year by the symphony orchestra of RTE, the Irish state broadcaster. But the work dried up and she accepted a place at the Guildhall in London to study acting. Jobs rolled in. ‘I got a lot of very big opportunities early in my career. I was very lucky. And I thought that’s how it would always be.’ (Cue ironic laughter.) ‘There was more work around then. It’s much, much harder now.’ The run of Cause Célèbre finishes in June and she has no idea what she’ll do after that.
‘That’s normal. I’m used to it.’ Stage work seems to be her abiding interest. ‘I delight in theatre. I go about once a week. The closer I am to the sweat and the spit, the better. I love the thrill that anything could happen and it’s going to happen in front of your eyes. And you may be the only person to see it.’
The process of rehearsal she finds ‘very, very precious’. She’s relishing the task of exploring the character of Edith, which is said to be based on the author’s mother.
‘Rattigan and his mother were inseparable. And the relationship between Edith and her son has a flavour, you would say, of being slightly too close. That’s something I really, really understood, particularly when you have only the one son. There can be too much riding on it. And poor old Edith is verging on obsession. She doesn’t realise the constraints she’s putting on him. She can’t let go. I’m aware of that in my own life, and wary of it, too.’
Her son is at school in south-west London where his interests, at 16, are sporting rather than artistic. He plays football for a local club and Cusack loves the camaraderie of the matches. (Her husband, Finn, runs the line.) Occasionally, she volunteers to coach drama students at her son’s school. ‘Being an actor myself I can very often see what it is that’s hampering somebody. And I delight in that, I delight in seeing someone take off.’ And she and Finn buy artwork from talented painters in the sixth form. The mix sounds familiar: sports clubs, amateur artists, drama groups, volunteering. ‘Your family’, I suggest provocatively, ‘are Cameron’s Big Society in action.’
At this, a shadow falls across her brow. The Prime Minister’s name seems to hang in the air like a leprosy spore. ‘Er, ah, well, I’m not a fan of, er…I’m not a Tory,’ she says carefully. But she’s equally disenchanted with the Labour movement. She renounced her party membership after the invasion of Iraq. ‘Realpolitik is the concept we’re hearing a lot of nowadays. And I find it pretty depressing how much compromise — compromise isn’t really the word — how much prostitution has to go on in order to keep a country economically in the game.’
She sees little scope for improvement. ‘It’s getting more and more desperate with the banks. And big businesses are getting away with blue murder, too.’ Is she worried about her son’s future? ‘Not so far. He’s pretty clear he doesn’t want to be an actor.’ And here she expresses a secret hope shared by many parents in these uncertain times. ‘Actually, I really want him to be a plumber.’
Cause Célèbre is at the Old Vic until 11 June.
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