Siân Phillips: ‘I fell madly in love with George Bernard Shaw’

When she was a schoolgirl, Siân Phillips was tasked with learning the role of Saint Joan over the weekend.

The boys’ school near the young actress was staging the play by George Bernard Shaw, and their Joan had gone down with an illness. “They called up my school and asked my headmaster, ‘Do you have a girl who could learn this in a weekend?’ and my headmaster said ‘Yes’,” Phillips reminisces with a laugh, “So off I went, and I had learnt it by Monday.”

However, come Tuesday, the boy was back well, and Phillips was robbed of her moment on stage. “That was my first encounter with Shaw, but I fell madly in love with him, of course.”

Only six years later, after finishing drama school, the dream was realised, and she played the iconic role. It was the first of many Shaw pieces she would go on to perform on stage and on television.

“The more I read about him, the more fascinated I’ve become by him…” Phillips muses, “His daily workload was phenomenal. He must have had tremendous energy and mental power, of course, because he was involved in so many things in our public life of the nation, then. And he never stopped writing notes and so many letters every day.”

The actress insists that any newcomer to Shaw or his work would be able to understand his writing instantly. However, for those who care to read the extensive notes, they would be rewarded: “You don’t have to know all this stuff, but it does increase the fun and the appreciation, I think.” It is with some nostalgia that the performer talks about the joy of holding handwritten notes in her hands and all that the ink on the paper unlocks.

Phillips will be introducing the inaugural Shaw Festival on 10 July at the Irish Centre in London. The weekend’s programme features talks, plays, Q&As and more in celebration of the centenary of Shaw’s 1926 Nobel Prize.

All of these years on, it is fun to imagine what Shaw might be writing about if he were still able to today. “He might have been guillotined!” she laughs, “He would have been in trouble, probably. He never had a very high opinion of politicians, so he would have been a bit shocked nowadays.”

Phillips muses that Shaw would have taken his pen to paper and written to newspapers, “because he thought it was his business to be involved with everything that went on,” she laughs, “He talked a lot of sense about most things, except when he was in a mood, and then he would talk nonsense about it. He must have been a devil to live with, is all I could say.”

Shavians, the name used to describe actors, fans, scholars, and more who specialise in Shaw’s witty, politically charged, and philosophical writing, include Ian McKellen. Phillips recalls performing in the one-act play The Man of Destiny at London’s Puddle Dock Theatre in 1966. In it, she plays The Strange Lady, who plays a man. “It’s a wonderful chance to put an actress in tight white trousers with boots up to the knee and a red jacket and a cocked hat,” she recalls, calling Shaw “Very much a man of the theatre. He knew how to get an audience in.”

Shaw, like Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams, Chekhov, is singular as a playwright: “Great playwrights tend to be great in a specific way. There’s never been anyone quite like him… he was an extraordinary dramatist.

“Playwrights go in and out of fashion, but a Shaw play will always be an event.”

The three-day Shaw Festival takes place from 10 July.