Dutch treat

Gemma Craven is revisiting the theatre where she began her career 36 years ago. Not that her debut at the Palace Theatre in Westcliff, Sussex, was an unmitigated success.

She was part of the stage management team as well as playing the small role of a maid in the farce Let's Get A Divorce. "On my first entrance, the actor playing the butler trod on my dress and I fell into the orchestra pit," she recalls.

Now the actress and musical star is returning to the Palace for the first time in John Godber's new play Going Dutch, which tours to theatres around the country until June after opening at Hull Truck Theatre.

The production is important for Craven not just because of returning to Westcliff but because it marks a change of direction in her career. Since making her name in The Slipper And The Rose, a musical film reworking of the Cinderella story, nearly 30 years ago, she has been most closely associated with musicals, not plays.

"I've done quite a lot of straight theatre, in fact probably more than musicals. But with musicals they tend to run longer because you need more time to recoup the money. It's a massive, massive overhead," she says.

She can only recall two plays in which she's toured. The others have been in the West End or at Dublin's Gate Theatre.

She reached the point a few years ago when she decided enough was enough, and to concentrate on non-singing roles. "I've done most of the musicals I want to do," she says.

"I wanted to finish with the musical side and make the transition because I'm at that age now. I've done the best of the musicals that I feel comfortable with.

'There comes a time when there aren't any more to do. I've had some wonderful, wonderful roles. Now, instead of the leads, I would be playing their mother.

"We have to grow old gracefully. I felt I would rather switch off and do plays. It has been tough, a very difficult couple of years to get that transition."

She pays tribute to her agent for being incredibly patient, waiting for the right roles to come along. Godber's Going Dutch was just what she wanted. "Really, in a way, this play and John have done me a world of good," she says.

Craven hasn't thought about straight roles that she'd like to play next, still being in the early stages of Going Dutch and getting that right before going out on tour for six months.

The production-- which also features Robert Hudson, Jackie Lye and James Hornsby - follows Sally and Mark, 50 and frustrated and cruising to Amsterdam for a Bruce Springsteen concert. A meeting with Gill, their college friend, and her new lover Karl, a sometime porn star, "whips their ordinary lives into a storm", as the press blurb would have it.

She's never worked for Hull Truck Theatre before and was intrigued when its director, playwright John Godber, phoned her agent to set up a meeting to discuss a new play he was planning. Craven and her management asked to see the script first, as they usually do.

The request was turned down for the simple reason that he hadn't yet written the play. "It was all in his head," she says. "We met and had a long chat for one and a half hours. He told me about the idea, which he's had for some years but wasn't the right time. Now he was going through this thing of coming up to 50 and felt it was the right time to do it.

"All I knew was that there were four people and I was one called Sally. When we got to Hull on the Tuesday for rehearsal it was the first time anyone had seen it. So we were reading blind. I loved it. We had great fun with it. It was incredibly casual and yet nerve-wracking at the same time."

The cast had the chance to inspect the Pride of Hull ferry on which the action takes place. "P & O did offer us a trip to Rotterdam and into Amsterdam but we weren't able to do it purely because rehearsal time was so short, and I say fortunately because the weather was so bad at the time," she says.

"We did go on the ship while it was in harbour and were given a private tour which gave us an idea of what it's like. It's massive."

She's never performed in shows on cruises. Her only experience is of flying to New York with English Chamber Theatre and doing two concerts on the QE2 on the return journey. She says she's not a particularly good sailor on small boats, but better on the big ones. She does, however, love sitting and watching the sea.

In a way, the role of Sally was written for her. "What John does, apparently, is that he has an idea for a play and an idea for people he wants to play these characters," she explains. "And, if he feels chemistry and everything is right, he more or less writes that character around you."

She can recognise some of herself in Sally. They're roughly the same age, although she not as prim and proper as her stage character.

"There's a big scene about drugs, which everyone is commenting on. I have never taken drugs in my entire life. I think I must be one of the very few in our business who have never smoked or taken drugs," she says.

"So it had to be explained what happens when people take things like that and how they behave, so I could do that scene. That side of Sally is the same as me."

Because the tour has a Northern bias, she'll be able to return to her home in Lancashire quite a bit. During the Hull season, which has resumed after a break over Christmas and the New Year, she goes back at weekends.

When we spoke she was surrounded by papers as she was busy doing her accounts. With only two-and-a-half weeks' rehearsal, she'd had no time before now. Things will settle down once the tour begins, although she knows it will be tough.

"Normally when I've done a tour it's usually about the same length but it's always been musicals. I've never done a play for this long. But it's such a fun play and there only four of us."

* Going Dutch: York Grand Opera House from January 24-29 (tickets 0870 606 3595) and West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, from April 11-16 (tickets 0113 213 7700).

Published: 13/01/2005