Anna Francolini on Awaking Beauty
November 25, 2008
“It’s the fact of having a familiar story, where you sort of know the way it goes, with a hero and heroine who’ll come up against something that will be resolved in the end,” says Anna Francolini. “You could almost do that with many fairy tales. This one is great because he (Sir Alan Ayckbourn) uses it to look at our modern perceptions of ourselves. For example, the ugly witch tries to win the heart of the prince – she’s very jealous, so she has a massive makeover and goes through a modern, plastic surgery kind of dilemma. It makes you laugh when you see it put out of whack a bit.”
Francolini, who is to play the wicked godmother Carabosse in Awaking Beauty, Ayckbourn’s final play as artistic director of Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre, is explaining the comic potential of giving a sequel to Sleeping Beauty. As befits such a playful piece, Awaking Beauty is a musical – Ayckbourn’s third collaboration with composer Denis King. As well as amusing the cast, Francolini tells me, their rapport helps to imbue their partnership with balance: “They complement each other well because Denis is quite big and gregarious and touchy-feely, whereas Alan is more observant and wise.”
As well as the advantages of Ayckbourn’s vast experience as both a director and writer, there are those that ensue from his familiarity with overlapping the two roles. “The benefit of him directing his own work is that he knows exactly what he wants,” Francolini says. “I feel in such safe hands. Some people don’t read stage directions, but when you’re struggling with something you tend to read them to make it clear, whereas fortunately he’s written them and can talk about it as well. I’ve watched him in rehearsals – you struggle and then he just gently pushes you in the right direction.”
Francolini takes great pleasure in playing an archetypal fairy tale villain that has gathered complexity from an injection of comic pathos. “I like playing the bad person,” she admits gleefully, “but it’s undercut by the fact that she’s cowardly and insecure, and all these things are so wonderful to play. You think someone has got power but actually they are just a gibbering wreck. All the laughing and spells, the nastiness – she thinks she’s got that covered, but then when she’s faced with loving somebody and hating way she looks it’s very real. That’s the brilliance of Ayckbourn’s writing – it has to be like that so that you can care about her.”
She is scarcely a stranger to musicals, having performed in, among others, Into the Woods (Royal Opera House, 2007), Merrily We Roll Along (Donmar Warehouse, 2000) and Company (Donmar Warehouse, 1996), but stresses that King’s score is unconventional. “This is different,” she argues, “because we’ve got a wonderful company of narrators. So you’ve got the four characters and the narrators are around the whole time and provide the music. We have a piano accompaniment, but also this massive soundscape of harmonies which is the band – we don’t have a band, it’s just a piano and them. It sounds beautiful and everyone is working hard to nail these amazing harmonies.”
So – is this work, with its humorous, but insightful and pertinent, subversion of the fairy tale genre and instrumentally skeletal but vocally ornate music the right note for Ayckbourn to conclude his 36-year reign on? “I think so,” Francolini reflects. “It’s very fun and uplifting, there are lots of people in it, and it’s got a sweet sort of moral. It is going to be tinged with sadness, but it is uplifting, fun and silly. I think it’s nice to go out on something as jolly as this.”
-Anna Francolini was talking to Simon Walker
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