Felicity’s good life

FELICITY Kendal may not have kept on her dancing shoes after competing on Strictly Come Dancing two years ago, but appearing on the BBC show has had a positive effect on her fitness routine.

While she says that being in something like that means that you can’t help having tremendously exciting memories of the experience, she admits that she hasn’t carried on dancing.

“But I do more exercise than I did before,” she says. “I used to do a lot of exercise and now I do even more, probably directly from Strictly because you get so fit doing it. It takes a long time, it takes a lot of hours of the week. There’s no quick fix.”

Kendal worked hard to get fit before appearing on Strictly, where she amazed everyone by doing the splits during a rumba routine with professional partner Vincent Simone “I used to do yoga when I was very young so there’s that legacy of exercise, and I used to go to dance class. I think that’s probably from my parents. They were into not aerobics, but into being fit,” she says.

“I do it because it makes me feel good, rather than what it looks like. It’s how you feel. I have more energy.”

She’s beginning to sound as if she’s a wee bit obsessed with exercise. Not at all, she says.

“I have certainly got it under control. There’s always a gym or a floor, so you can always find a way here or there to do some exercise.”

Her latest stage role, a tour of Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy Relatively Speaking, reunites her with one of her fellow Strictly competitors – former EastEnders actress Kara Tointon.

The play was Ayckbourn’s first London West End hit in 1967, with a cast led by Michael Hordern and Celia Johnson.

This marks Kendal’s first play by the Scarborough- based playwright since she played Annie in his trilogy The Norman Conquests nearly 40 years ago in the West End. Her performance earned her the best newcomer award from the Variety Club of Great Britain.

She’s in the third week of rehearsals when we speak which means they are “just pulling together and running the play”, adding that the “first three weeks are fun and now it’s a job”.

There have been offers to do other Ayckbourn plays in the intervening years but the timing hasn’t been right. She finds a play a year is the maximum she can do. In recent years, those have included a revival of Noel Coward’s Fallen Angels, new play Humble Boy, Beckett’s Happy Days, David Hare’s Amy’s View, Simon Gray’s The Last Cigarette and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession.

She didn’t know Relatively Speaking because she didn’t see the original and it hasn’t been done in London for a long time. “It doesn’t matter. There are some classics you have seen and remember and then have to erase what you’ve seen. I tend to do a lot of new plays so no one has seen them, so it doesn’t really matter. The process means you look at a play in a fresh way.”

Relatively Speaking finds young man Greg going to the home of the parents of Ginny, who he met only a month ago but is determined to ask her father for his daughter’s hand. Little does he know that Philip and Sheila, who he finds enjoying breakfast in the garden, aren’t really Ginny’s parents. Many misunderstandings ensure.

Sheila is a very fragile and nervous person, says Kendal, which isn’t the sort of character she often plays.

“I’m actually really enjoying finding out about her because I play a lot of feisty, independent, slightly outrageous, certain strong women.

“The last six or seven women have all been very intelligent, achieving creatures. Sometimes destructive but always powerful. It’s interesting to play someone who’s not in charge of her life, who’s married and looking after her husband.

“The two women in the play are very different. One is a modern woman with a lot of modern ideas about doing what she wants and is liberated sexually and mentally. The other is from an older generation that goes back to the 1940s, a housewife and woman who makes her husband’s dinner and gets his slippers.”

WHILE the public continue to know her best as Barbara from BBC back-tothe- land comedy The Good Life, her CV is stuffed with choice stage roles and TV projects from The Camomile Lawn to Doctor Who. Last year she returned to India, where she was brought up by parents who ran a touring theatre company, for a BBC documentary about Shakespeare’s influence on the country’s culture.

She’s not one of those performers who go looking for work or make their own. “I’ve never been one to go out and have the courage to look for it,” she says. “If someone comes to me then I want to be convinced I can do it. There are only a few actors who are able to go to producers and say I want to put on this and put on that. I’ve never been able to do that.”

Her ambition when younger was to do a lot of theatre and, in particular, new plays – both of which she’s done.

Her ambition now is to continue with what she’s doing rather than to set new goals.

“I’ve had a very lucky career in the theatre and it’s still – touch wood – happening. I am back with Ayckbourn, where I started very early on, and the point is that being in an age range there’s always another part,” she says.

Those who bemoan the lack of parts – a common complaint among actresses of a certain age – get no sympathy from her, as she feels anyone who’s going to be an actor knows there are times when they won’t be working.

“People write plays because they have an idea they want to write about. You can’t set out and say I’m going to justify the world and write five parts for women instead of three. I don’t think the world works like that.

“Writing represents society. Before it wasn’t the norm to have a woman as a doctor or lawyer or in other jobs. Now automatically because women are much more powerful in every single strata and every single job, from the prime minister down, you’re going to get more plays about women in interesting situations.

“I think it will look after itself and we shouldn’t moan about anything.”

Kendal, 65, has no intention of sitting at home. “I take time off when I’m with the family. I do half a year’s work and then think I’m not going to work through this particular time, I’m going to go on holiday with my kids. I worked very hard when I was younger. I try to get a balance now.

“I think there’s another play I’m going to do, so that will take care of next year.”

• Relatively Speaking: Newcastle Theatre Royal, September 3 to 8. Box office: 08448- 112121 and online theatreroyal.co.uk