(APPLAUSE)
KATHERINE: Hello.
Hello! I'm Rachel Cooke, and I'm delighted to be sitting here
on this very intricate, marvellous doll's house of a set
introducing Katherine Parkinson to you —
the star of
Humans
Her theatre work includes
Season's Greetings, here at the National Theatre,
Dead Funny
which is Laura Wade's beady look
at nostalgia, choice and contemporary relationships.
You were involved in this project —
it was developed here at National Theatre Studios
and the beginning of it was quite a long time ago.
You were there right at the beginning, so just tell us a little bit about it.
Was the part written for you?
Yes!
(LAUGHTER)
Well, it was, I think, six years ago, and I was pregnant with my first child.
Laura said she wanted to come round to talk to me about something.
She came round and I made her some disgusting cookies.
I was baking because I thought that's what you should do when you're pregnant.
And she said, 'I want to write a play
We've done an awful lot together over the years, Laura,
and I think she liked the idea of writing something with a specific actor in mind.
And I was delighted,
and then was just excited to see what landed.
But she always had the idea of vintage living and basing it on somebody
who'd made the choice to live in the '50s.
Judy, the character you play, she...
Well, the surface is big skirts, big hair,
you know, these colours and this delicacy and prettiness,
but inside, a lot is going on.
I wanted to know a little bit about how you approached performing that.
Because when she first appears, she is rather '50s.
She sounds rather '50s, to me.
She's rather clipped and perhaps a tiny bit cold.
Then you gradually realise that this play is about all sorts of things
to do with being a woman and being married and being thwarted.
I think it sort of grew in rehearsals.
The facade she has is the sort of facade of a marriage as well.
It's been interesting for me, because I've often played quite shambolic characters.
I've often played —
for instance, Masha in
people with drink problems, actually, where you're allowed to be unhappy
and the unhappiness shows in your physicality
and you can sort of slump and be a bit chaotic.
But with Judy, the unhappiness is very much held inside
because she has to be held,
and do all the housework stuff well, not just kind of fudge it.
To me, it's about someone who's depressed, perhaps, and suffering from ennui.
I think it's like the sort of
Betty Friedan's feminist book — in reverse.
That she makes a decision that she thinks will make her happy
and, actually, she gets all those things that Betty Friedan describes —
a sort of listlessness and a slight bewilderment, really.
I mean, it's not only about that.
You said that you see it more as a romance, which I think is interesting.
I think it's lots of things.
I think, first and foremost, I do see it as a romance.
It's about a marriage and making it work.
The metaphor of the jive, them dancing together,
how neither should lead, but it's a constant dialogue,
a constant conversation between them.
I think that's a beautiful analogy for a modern relationship.
I think also, like you say... Somebody was saying it's feminism as individualism.
When we now think that we're so kind of post-feminist
we can make a choice and it's a feminist choice.
So, I can make a feminist choice to have...
for instance — I haven't — breast implants or whatever!
That's just me being empowered, then you sort of think,
'Well, actually, what's our responsibility to the generation before us?'
'How would they feel about that?'
And, you know, do we actually have a responsibility to not make the choice
to be at home and wait on our husband?
And what does it do to the husband
when the pressure is on him, then, to bring all the money in?
I think it asks those questions in a very interesting way.
And the husband, who's played brilliantly by Richard Harrington —
it's a very funny and endearing performance, I think.
You would assume that he would feel very happy
that in the morning his bath is run for him
and the top's taken off his egg and all of that.
But, actually, you feel quite early on
that he's irritated or uncomfortable about it.
It's not exactly what he wants.
I think he loves his wife and he wants his wife to be happy.
In this particular case, Judy's choice to retreat from work...
She loves the actual work,
but is frustrated by the kind of pettiness of the workplace.
She's not paid as much as she maybe should be.
So she retreats. It's a sort of a fear of modern life, maybe the unfairness.
I think Laura deals very well with length of service
and things like that not being rewarded, perhaps.
They're all seen as '50s values.
So, she retreats,
and to me it's also about somebody with a certain amount of psychological unrest.
She's grown up in quite a chaotic way
with a chaotic mother,
and she's reacted against that.
She wants order. She's already of quite a forensic disposition anyway.
And she retreats, and she shouldn't.
And I think he, in time...
You know, everyone would like to have a cocktail
and their slippers and all the rest of it,
but after a while, he can see his wife sort of disappearing.
Yeah.
That's why he would rather have his wife happy and the house messy.
They don't have children, and I wondered about that.
The main relationships in the play are their marriage
and her relationship with her mother.
Did you think about that, the fact that they don't have children?
It seems to me to be somehow relevant to their relationship.
We did think about it.
There was a point when there was a version of the script that talked about it.
But I think the trouble is...
..when you have children, it becomes stay-at-home motherhood,
which is obviously a job!
— (LAUGHS) — Yes. Different thing!
So that complicates things.
It's a romance and many things, but if it is also going to serve as a satire
and make some points, maybe, about the choices women make,
I think probably Laura felt it was cleaner.
Because she's so kind of fundamentalist,
there are certain places she won't allow herself to go as well,
like pizza restaurants and shopping centres.
— Her world is quite small, isn't it?
It's like a sort of orthorexia or something, the equivalent.
She's so rigorous and she's somebody who's so organised
and so good at following things to their natural conclusion, that she starts off
and it's a bit of fun as you see in the first scene in the first half,
then it becomes sort of obsessive.
I think that ability for something to become obsessive and take over
is within all of us a bit.
It's a consequence of her fear.
You mentioned that someone had mentioned to you
that this play...might touch on Brexit,
but, obviously, it began long, long before the referendum.
What it does touch on is nostalgia
and the dangers of seeing the past in a certain way.
I mean...
I think it's very interesting
that we tend to both idealise the past and to patronise it.
Mm.
And I think that this play's very good about that,
the things that we take.
We pick and choose, I suppose is what I'm saying.
She picks and chooses.
It takes her mother to remind her about the bad things about the '50s.
She only wants to see a certain side of it,
which is what she perceives as a very comforting side.
Have you felt that this play, in a weird way,
arrived into the right context, because of all of this?
Certainly, although I do think things like the 'MeToo' thing as well,
which it was also written way before.
Feelings are bubbling under, anyway.
In the play, there's a little bit about sexual harassment.
There's a little plot twist about sexual harassment.
Yes, and she certainly kind of investigates, 'What are the boundaries?'
'What actually are they?'
I think a mood is always bubbling under.
I also think, with regard to the nostalgia thing,
she deals interestingly with fantasy and how fantasy is a sort of good thing.
But then it's not, you know,
when she talks about keeping the fantasy alive.
Her nostalgia, she sort of creates a fantasy.
So she could possibly argue that she's not saying...
She's fallen in love with the '50s, as advertised.
Because of it being the birth of advertising and so on,
there's a lot of our '50s memorabilia that never did exist.
— But it's that... — Yes.
But I think there was a mood bubbling under with the 'MeToo' thing
that then it feels pertinent.
That's why the 'MeToo' thing happened, because the feeling was there —
the kind of feeling that we wanted to call people out was collectively there.
So...
You know, it's funny when some people have said, 'Oh, gosh! There's that scene.
'Obviously, that was a re-write.' I was like, 'No, no, no.
'That was as it stood, pretty much from six years ago, or whenever it was.'
Were you someone who always wanted to be an actor?
Did you put on plays in your front room when you were seven, that kind of thing?
I did do that, but I didn't always want to be an actress.
I certainly did, looking back, the impulse probably was always there,
but I wanted to be an astronaut!
(LAUGHTER)
I'm looking into it next week!
You went to university before you went to drama school.
So, was it at school or university
that you first thought, 'Oh, actually, this is something I can do'?
— How possible did it feel?
Which is partly...
I went to university because I'm from a lower middle-class background.
My parents are teachers and very supportive,
but education was very much what they wanted to provide for us.
We moved to the grammar school catchment area, just so we could be kind of...
My mum chucked us in a room, trained us up for the 11-plus.
We all went to grammar school and we all went to university,
and that was kind of the deal.
Nobody in my family had been an actor.
I had a secret yearning, I realise now.
My mum answered that by taking me to see NYMT productions,
where I felt a physical pain that I wasn't on stage.
She was like, 'There you are! We've watched something now!'
I realise, with hindsight, of course, that's what I wanted to do.
Then you went to drama school after university.
I'm just slightly wondering, in a very nosey way, about the finances of all this.
Especially those first few years after drama school,
where, you know, it's hard and it's expensive to be...
Especially needing to be, perhaps, in London and all of that.
I mean, how did you do it, and how convinced were you
that you would be able to survive and succeed?
Well, I, um...
I went to university when it didn't cost anything.
I did four years but I had a lot of student loans.
I had a year out where I worked full time at TGI Friday's in Kingston-upon-Thames
to pay for some of it.
Then when I went to LAMDA they gave me the Lionel Bart scholarship,
which I thought was the Lionel Blair scholarship until very recently(!)
(LAUGHTER) There's no shame in that!
LAMDA were brilliant.
It was actually the late Jo Butterworth who was the bursar there,
who really went out of her way to... I remember having quite Dickensian things.
I had an anonymous donation from somebody,
who must have been within the school.
I lived at home with my parents,
and commuted from where they were living to the drama school.
Which was hard, because that was two and a half hours each way,
so my attendance probably wasn't what it should have been
for somebody on a scholarship.
Everybody was very...you know, respectful.
Because there are a lot of people at drama schools now who are privately funded,
which is not right.
They're very increasingly conscientious, from what I can tell, about that.
I left early to do a play that transferred from the Edinburgh Festival to the Bush,
but of course, it was no money and that was a tricky time.
I felt the pressure and fear from my parents,
who just wanted me to make it,
and show that I could make a living, because I was just doing theatre.
I don't think I could have made a living.
I couldn't have lived in London and made it work.
But... I met my husband
just about the time when I got
I knew when I got
I was so relieved and grateful for it,
because I wouldn't have stayed in much longer, is the truth.
Because I couldn't have done, and I've got friends who haven't stayed in it
who are just as able as me and they've got out because...
Just as able, if not more able than me.
They've got out because they haven't been able to afford it.
I think there needs to be as much done as possible
to make sure it's not just people that can staying in.
In the beginning,
I think people knew about you because of
That wasn't how I knew about you
but I think many people, that was how they knew about you,
and they associated you, and probably still do, with comedy.
Did you know that you were funny
or is being funny just like any other kind of acting —
you know, it's just a craft and you can learn it?
I've always assumed that, actually, being funny is a bit more difficult,
but I might be wrong, I don't know.
I don't know. I keep thinking about this, because I always sort of think...
You know, I don't think I'm always in control of whether I'm funny or not.
I don't. And then I...
If I ran for a bus and tripped up and somebody laughed at me,
I think I'd have a problem with that, but I thought, learning to be funny,
is that about controlling when people laugh?
Is that actually a sort of...?
What I do disagree with
is that comedy always comes from a defensive place.
I think that's why there's this idea that actors and actresses that do comedy
aren't good at doing the straight stuff, the tragedy or whatever.
I thought, 'Why do they think that?' and I think that's come from stand-up,
which is quite a defensive...
There's an energy in stand-up that means that you maybe would take a while to...
Because I just haven't ever felt any less inclined
to... try and make people laugh or try and make them do the opposite.
To me, it's kind of the same thing,
and that's what I've done a lot in theatre.
But obviously, when you do something like
there's no kind of dramatic element to that — at all!
So, then I was known for that on TV.
Then people come to the theatre
and go, 'Oh! You're doing theatre now?'
'No, I've done theatre quite a lot, actually.'
So it's not been a shock for me to do the drama stuff, is what I'm saying.
But I think, sometimes, when people come and see something
and they've seen you do a very broad sitcom,
where your toes are mangled or whatever, they're obviously a bit surprised!
How vital does the mixture of theatre and TV feel?
I mean, is it important to do both, or is that irrelevant?
I think it is important.
Part of the reason I chose my degree, Classics, is I remember thinking,
'I don't want to choose between history and literature and philosophy.'
I love the idea of the bigger... And also just not getting bored.
And I feel like that whenever I start a filming job, I think, 'I love filming!'
And when I start a theatre... And, you know, TV is very different from film.
Doing comedy is very different from doing something like Hugo Blick's stuff.
So, I think the mix is what I find most energising and most exciting.
Well, I'd like to thank you all for coming and for being such good listeners.
I'd especially like to thank Katherine, who's been great.
— Thank you.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)