Rachael Stirling will be butchering critics at the NT.
The revenge of Edward Kendal Sheridan Lionheart is a fantasy shared by every thespian who has ever hobbled across a stage. After a lifetime of snivelling notices, and denied the Critics' Circle Award, Lionheart starts murdering his detractors using implements inspired by Shakespeare's most grisly plays. Vincent Price played the cracked actor in the 1973 horror movie Theatre of Blood, and many consider it his finest hour.
Why it has never been staged before has nothing to do with the desire to butcher critics and everything to do with Hollywood politics. The constipated business of acquiring the performing rights from MGM has defeated scores of hungry producers. But Nicholas Hytner pulled several golden strings and paved the way for Improbable Theatre, the inventive team behind Shockheaded Peter, to stage the first theatrical version of the film at the National Theatre. It's a terrific coup, and it speaks volumes about Hytner's new standing as the José Mourinho of British theatre.
Jim Broadbent is Lionheart, and Rachael Stirling — best known for her lesbian role in the BBC's Tipping the Velvet — plays the great ham's twisted and adoring daughter, Edwina, renamed Miranda in the NT production. Sitting on a balcony overlooking the Thames, I'm struck by Stirling's eerie resemblance to Diana Rigg, the original Edwina. The auburn hair, intelligent eyes, sensuous mouth and peachy skin seem strangely familiar. The plummy voice is as comfortable as a well-sprung mattress, and her self-possession is pure Rolls-Royce.
"Actually, my mother is Diana Rigg," says Stirling, cocking an eyebrow and studying me as if I had just arrived from Mars. There is a hideous, awkward pause while she lights a Silk Cut cigarette. "You clearly haven't looked me up on the internet either," she adds cruelly. I wonder idly if I should throw myself over the railings now and have done with it, but the 27-year-old has a taunting smile on her face. She looks annoyingly pleased. Delighted in fact that this clueless journalist has failed to pack a single kinky question about skin-tight catsuits or the ghostly weirdness of playing a role made famous by her mother.
The ironies are ripe. Stirling is extremely mischievous casting by the director Phelim McDermott, and she readily admits it. "When I was called up to see if I wanted to audition for the part of Edwina, I said: Don't be so stupid (pronounced 'steuhpid'). It's my idea of cheesy hell.' I've spent most of my life turning down requests from swanky magazines to dress up in my mother's costumes, and this offer looked like one more. Theatre of Blood is a film I'd never watched. But then they sent me a DVD, and I was amazed by its potential as a piece of theatre."
The ambition is thrilling and audacious. Lee Simpson and Phelim McDermott have apparently turned a slab of Hammer-type kitsch into an eloquent account of a theatrical revolution. The stage version of Theatre of Blood is set in the National Theatre on March 15, 1973. The building is a concrete shell, a mere skeleton of its present self. The stages haven't been built yet. Lionheart is a virtual dinosaur. The age of actor-led companies is basically over. Decent seats had yet to be invented.
It captures, argues Stirling, a point in theatre history when "kitchen sinkism destroyed the dirty, delicious bigness of the larger-than-life actor. The John Osbornes of the world had arrived. Laurence Olivier had just resigned from his partnership with Peter Hall on March 13. And theatre was morphing into a corporate enterprise."
The issues are fascinating. The clincher for Stirling was the chance to work with Improbable, a British company second only to Complicite in terms of invention and improvisation. Their signature hit, Shockheaded Peter, graduated from the fringe to become a West End staple. It is currently earning improbable amounts of money on Broadway. The swashbuckling style of the company puts the fear of God into many actors (and, it has to be said, critics too), but Stirling doesn't mind "making a complete ass of myself".
A season at the National Youth Theatre after Wykeham Abbey exposed her talent. Shuttling between iffy movies at Pinewood Studios and Russian lectures at Edinburgh University nearly poisoned it. Stirling has worked with some bright screen lights: Clare Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci in The Triumph of Love; Jonny Lee Miller in Complicity; and Ioan Gruffudd in Another Life.
But the Improbables bow to no one. If you can't cut the mustard you are politely asked to leave. The rigour of their rehearsals is notorious, yet "liberating once you're involved", says Stirling. Alarmingly, her research seems to have made her fonder of her critical victims, despite the fact that the entire play is geared to killing them in thoroughly foul circumstances.
And why not? I doubt there's ever been a sweeter opportunity for actors to exact revenge on the critics. I've noticed Broadbent sharpening his teeth by turning up to first nights in the West End. Will our own Benedict Nightingale have sizzling hot daggers plunged into his eye sockets? Will Sheridan Morley be force-fed his poodles (as his father, Robert, was, in the original film)? Will Michael Billington end up like a pickled gherkin in a vat of vintage wine? Will Paul Taylor be chopped into pieces by tramps? Will Nicholas De Jongh's corpse get tied to a galloping horse across Waterloo Bridge? And will Charles Spencer end up kissing the girl? "No," says Stirling.
Frankly, I'm aghast at the sheer waste of these juicy opportunities to shame and maim. Surely actors live in hope? "It would be far too specific to introduce real critics," Stirling argues. "To do so would be fatally exclusive. The whole point of the show is to throw theatre back where it belongs."
The logic escapes me. The great joy of Lionheart's perverted revenge is the immaculate detail of his Shakespearean murders; the careful matching of soliloquies and plays to the humiliating insults; and the precise and judicious instruments of revenge.
"We had a session where each of us had to sit in the hot seat and relate our worst ever reviews," Stirling says. "We howled with laughter. I've had some corkers in my time and they stay with you like gaping wounds. I think that's because there's an inner critic somewhere inside that agrees with them. I guess the most hurtful comments were aimed at Tipping the Velvet. Apparently I didn't sound like an oyster girl from Whitstable but more like Jean Marsh from Upstairs Downstairs."
This is hardly a wrist-slitting humiliation, and in terms of theatrical knifings it is ludicrously mild. Stirling clearly doesn't get out enough to the arts pages of the Evening Standard, The Times, or the FT.
"There's an old truism that actors love nothing more in the world than other actors' bad reviews," she continues. "Lionheart speaks about it. It's a cliché. But the duality exists. It's rarely mentioned. It's also, I think, true. I see young actresses now like Kelly Reilly in Miss Julie or Eve Best in Hedda Gabler and I genuinely celebrate their success. But perhaps in 20 years' time I'll get all bitter and twisted."
It seems unlikely. Stirling may never enjoy the glittering run of parts that distinguished her mother, or indeed some of her peers, but she has the wit, beauty and brains to shape the odds in any direction that she wishes. The question is whether Theatre of Blood will change her life for ever. Her relationship to the play is unique. It is testing her limits as an actress, and it is forcing her to address fears worthy of Vincent Price himself.
"I remember as a very young child aged five going to the theatre with my mother. Before she went to bed, I would watch her take off her make-up. Sometimes I dreamt that underneath the slap was someone I'd never met. The layers would come off, and I would be left with a complete stranger.
"Ma and I are about as close as a parent and child can get," she insists. "But we fought hard for the relationship we now have. The danger, unfortunately, is that people will leap to conclusions about us which will undoubtedly make me deeply queasy."
Fret not, dear Rachael. I suspect the critics will be far more interested in the tools.
