WORK, REST AND PLAYS

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Oct 17, 2004 | by Vicky Allan

There is something about successful people who tell you that they're lazy. You can't help suspecting that they're either outrageously lucky or else lying. It's like when Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler, wrote a book called How To Be Idle and it took some suspension of disbelief to imagine that a truly idle person really could write a whole book.

Siobhan Redmond, one-time RSC actor and ex-Holby City star, widely thought to be the best Scottish actress of her generation, sits in her agent's office, projecting huge bolts of personal energy in the form of spiky anecdotes, flooring me with her acid self-deprecation, and claiming that she is indolent. "Fortunately, by temperament, I am phenomenally indolent," she says. Oh to be phenomenally indolent and yet still produce work like Redmond does; to rise from your bed, lounge listlessly for a few hours and then walk on to the set of The Smoking Room - the Office-ish BBC sitcom - and deliver a few lightning lines. Indolence like that embarrasses the rest of us.

So, what does she do when she's not working? She lives on her own in London with a couple of cats. Nothing? "Beats me. Hours can go past and I'm still gawking out of a window. It's very easy though, isn't it, just to look at the sky for a couple of hours, or listen to a piece of music? I could, I suppose, attempt to learn all the sonnets and I do sometimes read plays - although I find reading plays is not the best way to absorb them. But who cares if I'm doing mad scenes at home in my house? It would be an academic exercise, running through my greatest hits - preposterous. That really would be the time to call in the people with the white wraparound garment."

She laughs. She laughs a lot, a satisfied full-stomached laugh that underwrites almost everything she says - the poison darts and the immolations. "I'm not there yet," she adds.

Actually Redmond, despite her protestations that this is a quiet period, has been doing quite a bit of work. There was an afternoon play for the BBC, a radio dramatisation of Carol Ann Duffy's prose poem The Laughter Of Stafford Girls' High; a one-off BBC television play, The Trouble With George; the voice of Ailsa the snake in the hit children's series Shoebox Zoo; and The Smoking Room, which was originally broadcast on BBC3 and next week debuts on BBC2.

Obviously, she's not toiling like she was on Holby City, shot after shot kicking against the house style and the arc of her character. That was not what she wanted. For all that it was high profile and well paid ("immoral, how much I got for pretending to be a doctor"), Holby City knocked the verve out of her. "I didn't feel enthusiastic. It felt like, 'Oh not her again.' The thing that I'm sure a lot of people think, I was now thinking. 'Oh not you again. Not that face again, that terrible pinched face. Go away - I'm sick of it.' So I thought I would just do things that I would feel enthusiastic about and if there's been nothing that I've been enthusiastic about I haven't done anything."

She was enthusiastic about doing The Trouble With George, which is yet to be scheduled. "I can't tell you the joy of doing something for television in which there is no exposition. No scenes where people tell each other things they would already know. No dark hints to draw people in to watch next day, next week, next year."

She enjoyed, too, making the paranormal series Sea Of Souls. "Well I did eventually, once I stopped pretending that the real actress was going to turn up and do it for me. All actors know what you mean when you say that. 'Is the real person not coming?' 'No, it's you.' If my good twin could just materialise and do it for me that would be fantastic."

She often refers to her good twin as "the real actress". This twin, it turns out, is not at all indolent. She is diligent and self- disciplined. "She would go to voice classes. She would take herself seriously in a way that I am unable to do. I don't mean that she doesn't have a sense of humour. She has more a sense of urgency perhaps, than I do."

There are a lot things Redmond doesn't do. She doesn't go to the gym. She doesn't diet. "What I'm trying to say is, despite the fact it could be and possibly should be more of an issue for me at this point in my life [she is 45], it isn't. I begin to think, is there something really wrong with me? Am I just cheeky?"

Even her attitude towards smoking is just a little bit cheeky. She gave up only once, because she wanted to be able to do a speech for A Midsummer Night's Dream without getting breathless. It's typical that it was acting that prompted this. "I know it's tempting fate, but I'm only concerned about it as far as my work goes. I think if I want to die in a smelly heap, that's my right. As the late Bill Hicks used to say to the non-smokers in the audience: you're going to die too."

Work is her measure for everything. She has that one-track tunnel vision that, to those who don't have it, seems a gift, a blind faith. It's been that way ever since she was a child, growing up with theatrical parents, her mother an amateur thespian, her father a lecturer in English and drama at Strathclyde University. Back then, she "expressed a desire, no, an insistence that I wanted to act".