Cowardly angels

WHEN she says that reaction to her performance the first time she played in Noel Coward’s Private Lives was “all quite a surprise”, Sara Crowe is rather underplaying it.

She won an Olivier award as best supporting actress, after what was generally agreed as upstaging Joan Collins in her West End comeback and drawing rave reviews from the critics.

Collins and Keith Baxter were the stars playing the leading characters, but it was Crowe who ran off with the production.

“It was a bit of an eye-opener for a young school-leaver. I pitched up at the theatre on my bike, having no idea what was going to happen,”

she says.

It wasn’t a fluke. She’s had an on-off love affair with Coward’s comedies ever since, collecting another Olivier – this time for best comedy performance – for Hay Fever, and then playing the lead role in Private Lives. She’s going Coward’s way again, teaming up with Jenny Seagrove in his comedy Fallen Angels, which arrives at Darlington Civic Theatre next week.

They play best friends Julia and Jane whose husbands are away playing golf, when a mutual long-ago-lover announces his intention of paying them a visit. Their solution to the problem is to pop open a bottle of champagne, then another, then another. Lady-like behaviour goes out the window, along with sobriety.

The pair did a short tour in the play last year, and enjoyed it so much they wanted to do it again. “It’s a real tonic of a play. Very lighthearted and very uplifting. It puts a smile on people’s faces,” says Crowe.

Her close association with Coward’s work has only come about “by accident”, she says.

She’s always wanted to appear in Fallen Angels because it’s closer to farce than any of his other plays.

For much of the time there are just two characters – Julia and Jane – on stage, which means there’s no time to relax. “At first, it’s a bit of a shock because you realise you can’t switch off for a second. Normally, you can have a few seconds’ lull while someone else speaks and you recover your wits. The piece is so fast, and there’s only Jenny and I in the scene. You really have to concentrate,” she explains.

But she’s worked with Seagrove before – four times, with gaps of four years or so in between, so “you have a bit of a rapport and there’s a shorthand there”. Audiences love it. “It’s so silly and ridiculous and it’s physical as well.

The audience can relax and let it wash over them,” she says.

There’s drunken fighting too, that has caused her an injury. “It’s only a wound from a handbag. There’s a clip on top and I caught my arm on the handle and had a handbag accident,”

says Crowe. Although it’s fun and funny, like other Coward work there are deeper meanings if you care to look. “I love the mixture of wit in the dialogue, and cleverness and sharpness, and then the slightly deeper themes. He’s dealing with deeper issues in a light-hearted way, which is reassuring in a way in a world that’s full of trouble.”

DESPITE that, she probably likes Private Lives the best of his plays, and has done it twice. “That’s such a neat play. And he wrote things so quickly. I think Private Lives was written in two or three weeks,” she adds.

Her career has focused on comedy because “that’s the way it’s worked out”. She says: “I would love to do more drama, but when you’re in the loop of doing a certain thing, it tends to generate more work in that field.

“When I’ve done serious drama, I’ve loved that as well. It’s disconcerting if you’re used to having feedback from an audience in terms of laughter, but don’t get it and have the quality of silence. You can measure how it’s going if people sound as if they’re enjoying it.”

One aspect of her career that people seem to have forgotten about now, is her time as the face of Philadelphia cheese in the TV advertising campaign. “There were a lot of years I couldn’t go out without someone pointing at me and saying, ‘It’s the cheese girl’.”

She’s about to add another string to her bow – author. Her first fictional book, Campari For Breakfast, is being published in April. She calls it a coming-of-age novel that’s funny, but serious.

“I’ve always written and just determined, in the past couple of years, that it was time to finish something. It took three years to get it published, but once I’d got an agent, that really helped me to find a publisher. I wrote it when I was working and when I wasn’t – just all the time,” she says.

Crowe is nervous about publication because she hasn’t been through the process before.

“It’s all new to me, but I’m also quite excited about it coming out because it’s been a long time in the making.”

• Fallen Angels: Darlington Civic Theatre, Feb 3 to 8. Box Office: 01325- 486555 and darlingtoncivic.co.uk