A few of my favourite things: Honeysuckle Weeks
The Liberation of Colette Simple is a collaboration of eight lyricists including actress Honeysuckle Weeks, best known for her starring role as Samantha Stewart in the ITV wartime drama series Foyle's War. On stage she has been seen in A Daughter's A Daughter at Trafalgar Studios and Pygmalion at the Chichester Festival Theatre.
We caught up with Honeysuckle to find out a few of her favourite things…
What/who is your favourite…
Film?
Merchant Ivory's A Room With A View because of the exquisitely eccentric performances given by all of its actors. The cast list speaks for itself, but Helena Bonham Carter in the role of Lucy Honeychurch is particularly ambrosial. To me it encapsulates every idiosyncrasy of the English national character. But more than this it explores our nation's fascination and love for all that is the very opposite of itself. The English are reserved and measured, the Italians are carefree and passionate – and the film contrasts the two national character types to ingeniously comic effect.
Place to hang out in London?
The English Garden in Battersea Park. If you go there at dusk, the gardens hanging and climbing plants smell most heavenly. Then you can see a full moon behind the tall plane trees and feel as though you were not in London at all but in some Edwardian arbour. There are beautiful ponds and fountains filled with enormous carp and walkways with roses and jasmine and wisteria hanging overhead.
Or Battersea Power Station itself, before the developers got their grubby mits on it. A shrine to the heady days of the industrial revolution. An adrenalin kick to climb over the spiked fencing and coils of barb wire and escape the rabid dogs so that one can gape in awe at the night sky framed by those iconic black towers and feel raindrops fall on ones head from the vast chains of ironmongery that jangle in the breeze overhead. Epic.
Restaurant?
Peter Langham's first restaurant, Odin's in Marylebone. I go there to look at his beautiful collection of paintings as much as for the roast pigeon. It's free from that industrial look that quite a few restaurant's seem to go for. And the tablecloths and napkins are nice and heavy.
But the restaurant I most patronise is Pizza Express. You can't beat their dough bases. I always order the same thing, a white wine spritzer, a tomato and mozzarella salad, a Veneziana and the mini chocolate fudge cake with a cappuccino. Delicious.
Holiday destination?
The Okavango Delta in Botswana. You can hire horses that actually swim through lily festooned waters while you're on their back. This gives one an unprecedented view of the wildlife that you're swimming alongside of… hippo's, crocs, elephants; an arcful of wonders. Some of the horses at our camp had three gashes on their hindquarters where they'd' been swiped at by the aquatic lions. And I don't think I've ever done anything more extraordinary than gallop alongside a family of cantering giraffes through the thorn bushes and mopani trees… It makes you feel that they are running in slow motion. I didn't take a camera on this trip because I felt that the experiences should be for the heart only.
Play/Musical that you have seen?
The Liberation of Colette Simple which opens at Jacksons Lane Theatre on the 16th of September. Why? Because it was conceived by a friend of mine and I have seen the process through which it came into being; and having witnessed that process the first performance I saw very nearly brought tears to my eyes. When you can see all the hard work and the hours of practise that folk have put in I think it makes ones enjoyment of the end product all the more palpable. It was the first time I had heard lyrics that I had written being sung by somebody else and in a musical context. That in itself was a huge thrill for me. And the central character created and played by Nathalie Carrington is beyond endearing, you really root for her. Her singing is out of this world, it's a knockout performance.
Theatre you’ve performed in?
Well I have to say Chichester Festival Theatre. And not because it's been the seat of any glory or accolades I've won, far from it, in fact some of my worst reviews I've had performing there. "Phillip Prowse's marvellously pitched production was marred by Honeysuckle Weeks' impression of an ailing seagull ( as Eliza Doolittle )" being one of the most memorable.
I choose Chichester because it was the first stage I performed on professionally – I remember waltzing off it at the age of nine whilst playing a stoat in The Wind in the Willows. I fell off the stage due to an ill-fitting weasel mask. However I love going there because I think Jonathan Church is doing an extraordinary job at putting on productions that really capture the public's imagination. Also every actor I know loves coming in and off the stage through those 'voms'.
Actor/Actress?
This is a hard one because every time I see a play I love whichever actors are in that become my latest favourite actors. Maureen Lipman really blew me away in Daytona at The Haymarket, I think that possibly that's the performance of a lifetime. I didn't know this but I've just been told that one of the other eight lyricists involved in the The Liberation of Colette Simple, is actually her daughter…!
Every time I see Jessica Lange on stage or on film I cannot believe how she manages to be so precise with the text but also lend it a potent muscularity and dynamism. And she has a face that looks like it was carved out of a mountain.
Moment in The Liberation of Colette Simple?
When Colette revolts against the 'white picket fence' Middle American town she lives in and liberates herself and her canary in a moment of joyful and transformative anarchy.
The Liberation of Colette Simple runs at Jacksons Lane from 16 September. For more information and to book tickets, click here.
