Now let us fill in some of the achievements of our guests. Rachael Stirling is bringing her impeccable acting pedigree to a BBC Two film tonight about the Paris opening of The Rite of Spring: Riot at the Rite.
Now, in 1913, the great Russian impresario Diaghilev launched the preeminent star dancer Nijinsky's staging of Stravinsky's ballet score The Rite of Spring. The result was a riot, the subject of Kevin Elliot's screenplay Riot at the Rite, to be shown on BBC Two tonight at nine o'clock. A key member of the Diaghilev team was the Polish dancer Marie Rambert, who went on to form the Ballet Rambert based in London. In Riot at the Rite, she is played by Rachael Stirling, already well-known to television audiences particularly for her performance in the provocative Tipping the Velvet.
Almost as big a thing as Woodstock later in the century…?
That's the comparison I've been making. I mean, it's quite hard to envision something that so shook the… well, certainly the Paris bourgeoisie, but also just what had been accepted as classical music, what people most wanted to hear. There was this Stravinsky's dirge, and Nijinsky's sort of… toes turned in, the opposite end of, extreme of ballet.
You got very attached to the music, I gather, since you heard it.
Yes.
'Cause it's not easy stuff, not easy listening, is it?
No, it's not. But the more… I mean, the music… the ballet tells the story of this young… this young virgin dancing herself to death, and the more familiar one comes, one becomes with it, the more I fell in love with it. I just think Stravinsky is extraordinary! And his time signature! I mean, each bar! And I had to dance a fair set thwack of this. [laughter] They were… they were… I had to train in the, with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, so…
And then you were dancing with the Finnish National, weren't you?
With the Finnish National Ballet, yeah, and…
Actors are always impressed by the work ethic of dancers. Did you find it really stressing and straining?
They're extraordinary, yeah. I mean, they work for hours and hours and hours. And well also physically they're so much fitter than I am, and I was training with Zenaida, who's the leading ballerina of the Royal Ballet, in a studio in Birmingham. I mean, that was sort of fairly humiliating.
Was she encouraging?
[giggling] She was adorable, and she didn't laugh! I was very grateful. [laughter] But, no, I had to become familiar with the music, because Stravinsky's… he has different time signatures for every single line of music. You can have three bars of eight, and then two bars of two, and then one bar of four. And you have to move your feet according to how each bar is accented. It's the beginning of a kind of breaking down of rhythm. The first, I think, in history.
You didn't… we didn't see you doing any somersaults.
No.
'Cause Rambert was famous when she was in her seventies for doing somersaults.
She was extraordinary! She was fit as a fiddle to the end, to the very last. But she'd already started doing eurthymics with Dalcroze in the studio just before, and was picked up by Stravinsky as being the most sort of fitting person to help Nijinsky get these dancers to reeducate, basically, their bodies, from the classical formation of ballet to this extraordinary extreme of jumping up and down with your toes turned together.
I was fascinated to see the boy playing Nijinsky doing the counting from the wings, 'cause I used to know Lydia Sokolova who was in… but I see there's one person credited as Lydia, but Lydia swears that it was she who was shouting out the timing in the wings.
Oh, how interesting, 'cause… Marie Rambert, who was… when this… well, up to a few years ago was the only surviving member of the Ballets Russes from that period, remembered vividly Nijinsky, because nobody could hear the orchestra over the sound of the jeering! People going, you know, "What is this rubbish?!" in French and jeering at them [everyone laughs] and Nijinsky just had to stand on a chair and scream at the dancers, the beat…
Well Lydia said it was her, and that was in 1967. [laughter]
I believe Marie Rambert, of course. I'm biased.
No, Lydia's English, her real name was Hilda, so I believe her! [more laughter] You've packed a lot into a short amount of time. That Tipping must have made you extremely high-profile.
It did. I didn't like it.
If you'd like… I had to wade through forty-six pages of cuttings, all about Tipping the Velvet. You can have them afterwards, if you like…
No, thank you very much. I didn't really like it, and I wasn't ready for it. I went to university, not drama school, so I kind of… and then suddenly I got Tipping the Velvet and I was being photographed in odd places, you know, blubbing on my boyfriend's shoulder, and just… urgh, awful.
Odd fanmail, too.
So I disappeared… very odd fanmail! People tracing bits of their stuff on the back of a letter with an arrow saying "actual life size". [everyone laughs] And! [laughing] And my favourite one was "I only work in Tesco's, I'm only from Wolverhampton, but I do have very firm buttocks!" [everyone laughs again] "And if you and Keeley are ever in the area, please will you drop by?" [more laughter] But it was all a bit too much, so I went back to school and I've been in the theatre for the last few years.
And a great experience doing Theatre of Blood, I suppose, working with the Improbable Theatre?
Yeah. And Jim Broadbent, who made me laugh more than anyone.
And they made you do a lot of improvising, I gather?
Yeah.
Sitting on seats and reciting your worst notices, of which you can't have had many by then?
I had… ooh. I've had… I nearly swore then! I've got plenty of bad notices. And yes, it was, the ritual was you stood in the middle of the room and you read out the worst notice you'd ever got. Mine was frightful.
I loved that poor Times journalist who said to you, on starting to interview, "It's incredible, you know, you sound just like Diana Rigg."
[laughter] I know! I gave him… I sort of said, "Well, have you done any research at all, on me?" I busted him and he gave me a not very nice interview.
Well, it was a quite nice interview. We won't name him.
Oh, go on.
You have an ambition to present Woman's Hour when Jenni moves on?
Yeah. I love it. I just… I love how it's just… I'm quite curious about things and I think that would suit me very well. When she pops her clogs I'm in there. [laughter]
My favourite quote from all the forty-six pages I had to wade through is, "She's Audrey Hepburn with a touch of a building site thrown in."
[everyone laughs] I love that!
It's nine o'clock tonight on Two, isn't it?
It certainly is.
Well done. Thank you.
