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Life's still sweet for Jane
Metro 11.12.07
Stage hand: Jane Horrocks, although famous for her TV roles, feels most at home in the theatre
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Jane Horrocks welcomes me into her dressing room with a handshake firm enough to damage Ricky Hatton. She is tiny, ballerina-like, but seems to be built from steel and wire. She starts talking immediately, her flat Lancashire vowels sliding all over the place. 'Would you like a cake? I've got loads from this posh bakery. Do you mind if Cassandra does my hair while we talk?'
Horrocks is appearing in her first play in three years and, by God, is she nervous. 'Actually, the last time I appeared on stage, in Stephen Poliakoff's Sweet Panic, I'd left a gap of eight years, and I've never been so scared in my life,' she says, as Cassandra wraps her hair round a fat plastic roller. 'So this time I was determined to do an ensemble play where I didn't have a huge amount of responsibility. Next year I'm doing A Good Soul Of Szechuan at the Young Vic, which is a mammoth undertaking. So with this play, I wanted to ease myself back in gently.'
'This play' is Alan Ayckbourn's 1972 farce Absurd Person Singular, set over three consecutive Christmas Eves. Horrocks plays Jane - a housewife so intent on cleaning that when guests come round for drinks she's too busy wiping down the work surfaces to leave the kitchen.
A comedy about class snobbery, suburban values and women quietly going mad in front of their oblivious husbands, it's a mix of Desperate Housewives and Abigail's Party.
Horrocks has obsessive compulsive tendencies herself (she once had an obsession with swallowing and loves cleaning so much she brings her bleach with her to the dressing room) and fell in love with the script immediately. 'It's about hysteria in the weeks before Christmas, and many people can relate to that,' she says. 'The play becomes pretty dark, but it's still incredibly amusing.'
Horrocks has mainly worked in TV since emerging from a period of obscurity a few years ago, in which she devoted herself to bringing up her two children. Certainly most people know her for her TV roles, from the hilariously dim Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous to her most recent appearance as the amazing Mrs Pritchard. Yet it's theatre - her credits range from Lady Macbeth in Mark Rylance's 1995 production, in which she famously peed on stage, to Sally Bowles in Cabaret, directed by then-boyfriend Sam Mendes - where she feels most at home, since it allows her more fully to escape. 'I've certainly had my best acting experiences on stage, where I've had almost out-of-body experiences,' she says. 'In nearly all my theatre roles, I've been able to hide behind somebody else.'
This is significant: for Horrocks, acting is all about getting as far away from herself as possible. As a child growing up in a workingclass Lancashire family, she discovered early on a gift for mimicry and used it both as something with which to gain attention but also, paradoxically, as something to hide behind.
Her ability to impersonate the great singers of the 1940s and 1950s inspired her career-defining role as Little Voice, the terribly shy girl who came alive through singing in the voices of Judy Garland and Marlene Dietrich. Jim Cartwright wrote the play The Rise And Fall Of Little Voice for her, and it was later turned into a film.
Though Little Voice wasn't an autobiographical character, Horrocks could certainly relate to her. 'Mimicry comes from a sense that you don't feel at ease in yourself,' she says. 'Soap actors are obviously very comfortable in themselves in order to be able to play themselves for so long. I couldn't do that. Because I've got such a distinctive voice, I never feel comfortable playing in my own accent, which can be detrimental because casting directors often want me to be more like me, not less. But I do feel happier since having children. You think, oh sod it - there are bigger things in life.'
Her children are now old enough for Horrocks to pursue her career more energetically. 'You have to keep your hand in,' she says. 'Turning 40 is a tricky time for an actress: if you don't keep working, people think you are dead.'
She's still as picky over her parts as ever. 'I'm only interested in characters who are out of the ordinary,' she says. 'I never get sent horrible parts, though: people seem to think I'm too nice.' What about Nicola, the chocolate spread-smearing bulimic in Mike Leigh's 1990 film Life Is Sweet? 'I suppose she was a horror,' Horrocks agrees. 'But a vulnerable horror.' And she offers me another cake.
Absurd Person Singular, tonight until Mar 22, Garrick Theatre, Charing Cross Road WC2, tonight 7pm, otherwise Mon to Sat 7.45pm, Wed and Sat mats 3pm, £15 to £45. Tel: 0870 890 1104. Tube: Leicester Square
