TAKE a very serious theme, write it as a comedy, and you have what Janet Suzman calls “a very English thing”. When she and Alan Bates played the parents of a mentally disabled child in Peter Nichol’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and played it for laughs, they were told that the Italians wouldn’t buy it. The Americans were deeply shocked. British audiences, on the other hand, were able to laugh and cry at the same time.
Playwright Brian Clarke is in that tradition. His play, Whose Life Is It Anyway, is about euthanasia; it has a profound message, and it is full of laughs. In the original production Tom Conti played the bed-ridden, paralysed man around whom the euthanasia debate was conducted – he wants to end his life.
In the current revival, directed by Peter Hall, Brian Clarke has turned things around: instead of a male there is a female judge, played by Janet Suzman, and in the bed is Sex and the City actress Kim Catrall. “She is simply wonderful,” says Suzman. “Sexy up-to-the-minute- it was a great coup to get her.”
She describes her own part as an antidote. “I like playing antidotes,” she says. “I come in with the hard-nosed facts. I have to decide whether the woman has the right to kill herself. It’s a brilliant play, and as a revival, it’s perfect timing.
“Euthanasia is such a hot subject at the moment – the case of Diane Pretty, for instance. And most recently they did acquit the policeman who killed his terminally ill wife. I think public opinion often builds up until the law has to accept something, and it will happen with euthanasia.”
It is the only sensible solution, she says; there must be a way found for people to get out when they’ve had enough. She thinks medicine has become too clever at keeping old people alive, and quotes the Cumaean Sybil who asked for eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. “That’s what’s happening to us all. There’s a lovely old expression: ‘She turned her head to the wall.’ We ought to be able to do just that.”
As the judge in the case she is only on stage for the final 20 minutes of the play. It is something that has never happened to her before, but she is grateful for it. She does not have to carry the play. And she has plans for later in the year that will involve a great deal of her time and energy.
She has always been very much involved with theatre in her native South Africa, and later this year she is going to direct a production of Hamlet in Capetown. She has already been there to cast the play, and has a young Indian as Hamlet and the great South African actor, John Kani, as Claudius.
“I did Othello with him in 1987,” she says. “None of us knew then that apartheid was on the way out, so it was rather a bold thing to do, with its marriage of a black man and a white woman. The play does not patronise; it is about emotional thuggery rather than anything. It spoke to a black audience – and the proportion of black people coming to the theatre grew every night.”
What she calls her “multi-coloured Hamlet” will open in the summer at the Grahamstown Festival – “the southern hemisphere’s answer to Edinburgh”, and she is looking forward to going back, as she always does. “I can’t keep my toes out of Africa. I have to go and water my roots from time to time,” she says.
That said, she loves Hampstead and she loves the pretty house in Keats Grove where she has lived for 22 years. She has, of course, made her views on what is happening in her neighbourhood manifestly clear. For one thing, she regrets the imminent arrival of Marks and Spencer to South End Green. She has nothing against them per se – she thinks their food has done as much for the eating habits of Brits as Terence Conran did for their homes – but has no doubt that their store in such a small, domestic setting will change the atmosphere. “At the moment the area has individuality, and I worry that all the little shops will be forced out by rising rents,” she says.
Just mention the 168 bus, and she rolls her magnificent eyes and says that the in-fighting has gone on for long enough. “We must not get over-emotional about this,” she says.
“But the surrender of a pretty village to vast phalanxes of buses is a shame. South End Green should not be sat on by a lot of metal. How would I solve it? First, the timing of the buses should be regulated so that they don’t stack up. Then they should re-fashion the space in the existing bus station so that it can accommodate both the 24 and the 168. It’s not rocket science, after all.”
She finds the length of time this altercation has been going on quite incomprehensible. It is, after all, about only one thing: our care for the environment we live in.
“In the end it’s up to Camden to solve the problem nicely and fairly for the inhabitants of this place”.
• Whose Life is it Anyway opened last night (Wednesday) at the Comedy Theatre. See Theatre, page 12.