Pru keeps mum on plot of play
PRUNELLA Scales is refusing to give away the secret. About to hit our stage in a monologue of Gertrude’s Secret, she is keeping it close to her chest.
“I can’t tell you,” she says. “Theatre is all about experiencing it – you will need to come and see it if you want to know.”
The 66-year-old actress is not being difficult, she is simply following the golden rule of not giving the plot away.
Gertrude’s Secret is a series of nine monologues with Prunella taking the part of Gertrude. In her ten minute slot she sits forlorn on the sofa in her padded dressing gown waiting for the phone to ring. It is her birthday and she is hoping her daughter Kimberly will have remembered and will call to wish her many happy returns.
“The monologues are not related,” says Prunella. “But they are in turn sad or funny. They are very cleverly written.”
Here Prunella has to advise of a personal interest as they were written by her second cousin Benedick West.
“He is a journalist but wrote these monologues and showed them to us,” she says. “This part wasn’t written for me. I don’t think good writers write for specific people, they write because they have to write. But it is very insightful.”
Posing the question whether Prunella’s husband actor Timothy West was also interested in taking part, Prunella disappears to ask him. Seconds later she comes back with: “He was busy at the time but also he says there wasn’t really a part for him in it.”
Prunella and Timothy have become part of the theatre fabric of the country. Not only do they have countless stage, television and theatre roles to their name but their son Sam West is also an actor and held the post of artistic director of at Sheffield Theatres in 2005-6. Prunella is perhaps best known as the long-suffering Sybil in the television series Fawlty Towers but she has also taken parts in the films Howard’s End and A Question of Attribution and the radio series Ladies of Letters.
And Prunella says acting has always been a family affair – also including their other son Joe.
“We always find it useful to listen to each other’s comments,” she says. “The children started coming to the theatre very young and we have always been interested in what they say. Sometimes they said they hated it when we did something or other and we would say ‘good’ because that was what we wanted to achieve.
“There is that time when you hear ‘Darling, you know that bit when...’ and sometimes you will listen and think about whether to change something and at other times you explain what you were doing there. It is part of the profession to support each other.”
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