Playes and Players
March 1975

ROSEMARY McHALE and KATE NELLIGAN in interview with Michael Coveney

WHAT EVER ELSE we may be short of at the moment, it's certainly not a younger generation of gifted actresses. The critics' poll in January P&P resulted in 13 votes cast (out of a possible 18) for Kate Nelligan's performance last year in Knuckle and London audiences can currently see how 'promising' she is as Ellie Dunn in the National's newest production at the Old Vic, Heartbreak House. ……..(Author goes on to tout Rosemary McHale’s talent and accomplishments. Rosemary McHale interview.)

…Kate Nelligan has at least in common with Rosemary McHale that she has appeared in a play by David Hare. (Miss McHale was in the original production of Hare's Slag at Hampstead, ceding the part to Lynn Redgrave in the subsequent Royal Court production). Miss Nelligan is someone for whom things have gone very well over a short period of time. 'I'm being "promising" at the moment. But pretty soon I'm going to have to stop being "promising"; right now, in fact. In Heartbreak House I mustn't be promising, I must be bloody good, or bloody bad, as the case may be. That's hard. I want to go on being "promising"!'

The frankness is almost disarming and very likeable in one who has consolidated a,i early start in the Bristol Old Vic with nationwide exposure in the third series of the successful BBC programme, The Onedin Line. Miss Nelligan is Canadian, of good Catholic stock, and came to England in 1969 to attend the Central School and escape the family's disapproval. 'I was 18 and no-one agreed with my being an actress, so I knew it would be best to be physically removed from them until they got over it. Also, British drama schools have a tremendous reputation (which I'm not entirely sure they deserve)-but I have great regard for Central and the people who run it although the course is three years and I think two is enough. The situation there of having 25 or 30 fantastically ambitious, ignorant young people who want to be big stars (and we all did) -that situation in itself produces a lot of nastiness.'

At Bristol. Miss Nelligan was hired as resident Yankee for a season including Barefoot in the Park and Streetcar Named Desire. She also had her first brush with Shaw, as Hypatia in Misalliance and a taste of the Irish as Pegeen Mike in Playboy of the Western World. Thence to the high seas and the BBC before starting work, a year ago, on Knuckle. 'As we got further and further into the production, I could see an alternative version which was far sparer and less insistent on the surface brilliance of the writing. But the pressures of going into the West End necessitated the emphasis we gave the play. Perhaps we were wrong to do that. If the play has a weakness it is that it is too ambitious. The marvelous reception I bad for my part was to do, I feel, with the fact that the play was unfairly received. One's worst fears about what is happening to the theatre in this country were proven true.' It became easier for the critics to say something nice about an attractive actress than to delve for the qualities of a new, difficult play? 'Yes. In a way it gave them the chance to say "There's this marvelous new girl, you must go and see her" while they shitted all over the play. The play was far better than I was and the part was far better than I was.'

The current work is daunting from several angles. Shaw's play, which he always thought of as being about War is, of course. about nothing of the sort until the final paragraphs. Or scenes, rather. It was written over such a long period of time that it ends up very differently from how it began; but for an actor there are the additional problems of coping with sudden symbolism and veiled sociological statement as deflected through what is basically a cumbersome, though compulsive, yarn about 'failing in love'. Miss Nelligan sees other hurdles. 'People come to Shaw rather as they come to Shakespeare; expecting to be bored but hoping, vaguely, to be roused. The trick is to make those long scenes seem very fleeting. I read the play and thought "This is wonderful-I don't know what it means, but it's wonderful."

And I find it incredibly important to retain, over the rehearsal period, those first impressions. If I keep them in mind, then I'll keep the audience in mind. 'It's also very important to me to be what other characters say I am in the play. I wouldn't have done this part if I didn't feel that there was a lot in me that could be used for Ellie. She is said to be lovely, ladylike and to prefer graver, solider things. It is very important to be cast properly! Ellie is deeply naive, but not in a boresome, aggravating way. I think of her as I think of Dorothea in Middlemarch; like Dorothea, Ellie makes a terrible mistake in love for all the right reasons-she is too good for this world. She is a wonderful girl who has terrible things happen to her. She falls in love with a man who is married and who has lied to her-that breaks her heart. So she wakes up with the discovery that she is living by rules that nobody else in the world lives by and she decides to start bloody well playing the game by everybody else's rules. She becomes very practical, very businesslike and commonsensical - until Shotover saves her.'

As Miss Nelligan talks about the part, she becomes markedly intense. This, after all, was one of Edith Evans's famous roles (in 1921); we are sitting in the Lilian Bayliss dressing room at the Old Vic; Sir Ralph Richardson's hat and stick are proof of his spiritual occupation of the room; a light salad and a smart bottle of dry white wine are ignored as the conversation spirals and the rehearsal hour approaches. 'When I did Misalliance at Bristol I found it agony. This is a bit easier because the speeches are shorter, on the whole. People talk about technique, but I don't have a clue about all that. The speeches of Ellie are real to me so I have a feeling that if that is so, and if I can make them real to other people, then that's what it's all about. Edith Evans has said that acting is like telling the truth, and I tend to think, in my worst moments of desperation about the part, that if you just tell the truth then it will be all right. I should think that in the second month of doing the play I'll realize that I have to breathe in a certain place in order to get a specific laugh; but at this stage of the game I'm just looking for the truth.'

Miss Nelligan's father, who has never before left Canadian shores and who hates the whole business of sitting in a theatre, is coming over in April to see his daughter at the Old Vic. 'I've already reserved for him an aisle seat so that he can escape from Heartbreak House without too much fuss! The only other time he's been inside a theatre was when I played Gertrude at university and he made so much noise escaping from that that I've promised to arrange for a chair and a cigar in the Old Vic foyer! He's going to be very bored. But, deep down, I suppose he's thrilled. It's all very glamorous at the moment.'

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