As she prepares to take on her first role in a Tennessee Williams play, experienced actress Deborah Findlay tells Caroline Bishop why she loves learning on the job.
Deborah Findlay has been swotting up for her forthcoming literature exam. At least, that’s the way it appears as she flicks through a thick spiral-bound notebook stuffed with hand-written notes, searching for a particular Tennessee Williams quote. In fact, the actress is rehearsing the role of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, and director Joe Hill-Gibbins has given her plenty of homework. Unlike most self-respecting students, Findlay is relishing every second.
“It’s absolutely fascinating to do these things because every play you do you just learn around the piece,” she says, the enjoyment lighting up her dark, deep-set eyes, recently seen peeking out from under Augusta Tomkinson’s bonnet in the BBC’s Cranford. “This play has really benefited from the sort of research that we’ve been doing.”
Findlay and her three co-stars got into the spirit of things straight away, getting together before rehearsals started to have an evening watching classic film Gone With The Wind. Their research into the American Deep South, the spiritual home of Findlay’s character Amanda Wingfield, continued from there. “I’ve become an expert on the Cakewalk,” grins Findlay.
The actress is sipping a latte at the Tricycle theatre in north London where the cast are rehearsing; soon after we meet they move south (of the river, that is) to another neighbourhood theatre, the Young Vic, which will be transformed by an “extraordinary set” for Williams’s 1944 memory play.
The Glass Menagerie is set in urban St Louis, Missouri, where Amanda, abandoned by her husband, lives with her two adult children, Tom and Laura. Their poverty-stricken, city-dwelling existence is a world away from the rural idyll of the Deep South where Amanda spent her own youth. An overbearing figure who is desperate to secure her children’s future, she pushes her fragile, shy daughter towards a romantic liaison with a friend of Tom’s who, it turns out, cannot offer what she hopes.
Being an autobiographical piece – Amanda is based on Williams’s mother Edwina and the family did live in St Louis – Findlay has found she can research from the horse’s mouth. “The material that you’ve got to help you realise these characters is just massive, because they all wrote memoirs,” she says. “It’s in her own words, which is even better because you get her cadences and the way she spoke and her mythologising of her past in the South, the balls and the picnics, as Amanda does in the play.”
It would not be hard to draw comparisons between Amanda and another of Williams’s great female roles, the faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. Findlay agrees, but credits Amanda with more “endurance and a kind of heroism”.
“There’s a sort of indomitable spirit to Amanda,” she adds. “I don’t think she would crack like Blanche. What’s fascinating to play and to look into is that conflict between the two things. She’s [Amanda] the sort of person who will put on an old frock and waltz about and talk about her memories of balls and summer evenings but will equally get down and scrub the whole apartment herself.”
“It’s absolutely fascinating to do these things because every play you do you just learn around the piece”
Whatever her character’s faults, Findlay is preparing to fight her corner. “All the things that she can teach her children, which are to do with southern gentility and living a charmed existence with servants and whatever, are of no use to her children who are growing up in an urban, poor environment. So it’s not that Amanda is cruel, she is just teaching them things that aren’t going to help them.”
“It’s not useful for me to think of her as a monster, because nobody thinks of themselves as monsters,” she adds. “It’s up to everybody else to see her as they will. I’ve got to find her positive side.”
This finding of positives in a character that could be seen as fault-ridden is a talent that Findlay has mastered over her long acting career. Of her turn as a brothel madam in 2001 play Mother Clap’s Molly House, The Independent said Findlay gave “a star performance of comic brilliance, fired up by and glowing with the show’s most attractive quality: its tenderness”; Michael Billington in The Guardian wrote of her recent appearance as a divorced, faithless architect in Anthony Weigh’s Like A Fishbone that she “successfully humanises” the otherwise unsympathetic role.
“I think people have their own reasons for doing things. I suppose what I do is I find those reasons for actions. I think that’s just much more interesting,” says Findlay. It was a skill learned early; she talks of working with the Royal Court’s then-Artistic Director Max Stafford-Clark on the 1982 premiere production of Caryl Churchill’s seminal play Top Girls, in which she played Joyce. “There’s a scene at the end between the two sisters where there’s a monumental argument. You could play that argument as an argument, but what he asked us to do was to try and make them connect all the time and love each other, and fail to love each other. It produces a much more complex and interesting thing happening on the stage.”
Findlay has been learning on the job right from the beginning. Having completed a degree in English Literature, she did not go to drama school, but began her acting career in community productions at Theatre Royal Stratford East. She has “learnt on my feet,” ever since, from the best. She credits Stafford-Clark with teaching her how to approach a text, while she was taught to speak verse by the Royal Shakespeare Company, where, in the 1980s, she appeared in Twelfth Night and The Merchant Of Venice alongside actors including Antony Sher, Roger Allam and David Bradley. “That’s why it’s such a great job. You just learn new techniques to approach a text, or to look at things, because you are working with actors and directors who are bringing different elements.”
“I’ve become an expert on the Cakewalk”
Her acting education continued at the National Theatre, where she turned out acclaimed performances in Pam Gems’s Stanley – for which she won a Laurence Olivier Award in 1996 – The Winter’s Tale, The House Of Bernarda Alba and Mark Ravenhill’s Mother Clap’s Molly House, and at the Donmar Warehouse, which cast her in The Vortex, John Gabriel Borkman and The Cut.
She frequently plays women with complex hang-ups, inner angst or unappealing qualities, Amanda Wingfield being no exception. Findlay laughs at the suggestion. “It’s partly the ones that appeal and partly the ones you are offered as well,” she says of her role-call. “I also love being funny. Going back to Amanda, that’s what’s so great about this because it runs the gamut of everything. As he [Williams] says, she is ridiculous and tragic, and that’s as most really tragic people are, there’s a comic-ness about them isn’t there?”
This love of comedy does not surprise me. Behind the softly-spoken voice and respectable appearance I detect a mischievous streak. It is apparent in those dark eyes, which crease into crow’s feet – that sign of frequent laughter – and in her warm, at times conspiratorial, manner. She says she is a private person, and I get the feeling that those within her private circle would see a cheeky part of Findlay that is not publicly revealed. Talking of performing on Broadway, she says: “The first time I went with Top Girls I was a bit overwhelmed with New York and a bit shy. Then the next time, with Stanley, I thought ‘I won’t be shy’. I really embraced it.” The smile that accompanies that final sentence tells me she had a good time indeed, but she won’t be disclosing any more than that.
Mischief was, by all accounts, rife on the set of Cranford, the hit BBC TV series based on Elisabeth Gaskell’s novels in which Findlay played spinster Miss Tomkinson. “There really was a sense of camaraderie and then when we did the Christmas special it was just like meeting old friends, it was really great. Pretty much all the crew was the same as well.” They were even wearing the same frocks.
“It’s not useful for me to think of her as a monster, because nobody thinks of themselves as monsters”
Findlay starred alongside Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton and Julia McKenzie in this tale of village life told through the eyes of four women of a certain age: a rarity in television and a reason for its success, says Findlay. “I think to a certain extent it was those strong women – older women – forming a very solid, powerful community in their little village, people that probably hadn’t been seen or focused on much before. I think it was the sense of community that people responded to, that everybody really did take care of each other. There might have been petty quarrels and things, but there was an overriding sense that people looked out for each other, and I think viewers really bought into that life.”
Watching Cranford it is clear what a quality crop of older actresses we have in Britain, a dynasty that is not often allowed to rule the roost en masse. However, Findlay has several times appeared in all-female casts on stage, a fact that is notable because such plays do not come around very often. As well as the original production of Top Girls, she appeared in Lorca’s The House Of Bernarda Alba both in the 1986 Laurence Olivier Award-winning production at the Lyric Hammersmith and again in 2005 at the National Theatre. In 2009, she joined Dench, Frances Barber and Rosamund Pike for the all-female Madame De Sade, staged as part of Michael Grandage’s Donmar West End season at the Wyndham’s theatre.
Though Yukio Mishima’s play was less critically successful – “I think it was a very, very difficult play and I think when we opened none of us were really quite on top of it,” offers Findlay – the acting was universally praised and the presence of the stellar female cast on stage in the West End was an event in itself. What a shame that these opportunities do not come around more regularly, because, after a lifetime learning from the best, actresses such as Findlay are ripe to give a masterclass of their own.
CB