Viv Hardwick talks to Sarah Parks about taking on the role of Marlene Dietrich in Scarborough.
AN air of tragedy has been added to the revival of Marlene at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, following the death of playwright Pam Gems – who also created the musical Piaf – just over a week ago.
Sarah Parks, who steps into the sultry role of temptress Marlene Dietrich from tonight, says: “What the play offers is what lay behind the veneer and the image of Marlene Dietrich. ‘What makes you tick?’ Dietrich was once asked and she called it a strange expression, but this is exactly what the play is about.
“Pam Gems managed to wonderfully reveal the woman behind the illusion and also threads her famous songs throughout the evening.”
Gems opted for the period of Dietrich’s life towards the end of her career in the mid-Seventies, when the performer was also in her 70s – Dietrich had started down this road in the Fifties and was paid a fortune on the cabaret circuit, earning $30,000 a week in the US.
“This is probably the greatest challenge of my career.
It’s a tremendous play in itself because she is such a fascinating character,” says Parks, who admits she didn’t know too much about the German actress and singer when she auditioned.
“I then read more and more about her and came to realise that she was such a complex person. Her life was so full, it wasn’t all movies and Hollywood.
She was continually reinventing herself to sustain her career. As a result, her profile was enormous for 50 years.
“There is a theory that she invented the whole notion of celebrity. She came to Hollywood rather late in life. She was nearly 29 and came from Berlin where she’d already had a career, which she rather played down. So she had three careers: the Berlin cabaret circuit and silent films, Hollywood and then, in the Fifties, when the film work dried up, she reinvented herself as a touring concert artist,” says Parks.
Famously, Dietrich let it be known that she needed the money and Parks says: “I think she did because she spent money very readily and this is covered by the play, where she thought nothing of having whatever she needed when she needed it.
And it was about need and not indulgence. As she was moving towards her 70s she needed everything just so, the right costume, the right wig and everything right and could be quite intolerant of anyone who didn’t do their job properly.”
The actress is in her 50s and jokes that this makes her the right age to play Dietrich in her 70s because the German, who became an American citizen, “was tremendously well preserved, not without some assistance”.
Parks sings many of the famous Dietrich songs, her signature tune Falling in Love Again and Lili Marlene, and admits this was another challenge because she’d moved from musical to drama several years previously.
“I sang quite a lot in choirs in my youth and I was in a production of The Boys From Syracuse, which Judy Dench directed, years ago. I preferred drama really, but this play is a wonderful combination of both.”
Does the English actress like Dietrich?
“I do, I really do. I have immense admiration for her. The play also touches on her lovelife, which involved both men and women.
“My father’s generation was very conscious of the fact that she had an appetite for the ladies as well as for the gentlemen. She came from a Berlin that was ravaged by the First World War and there were few men and women walked around in men’s clothes and performed cabaret in top hat and tails.
There was a fascination with cross-gender behaviour and she came from that environment to Hollywood and the Americans were very startled by it.
But all she did was persist in doing what she’d done for ten years.
“The Blue Angel introduced that notion to the American public and she generated that behaviour which produced some copycats,” says Parks of the three-hander play which drops hints about Dietrich’s involvement with other women.
The actress says that Dietrich had a tribe of devoted followers and helpers and that the star wasn’t adverse to using them when she needed them. “She was also, at times, quite generous, making her a curious mixture of exploitation and generosity, which characterises all relationships she had. But she was feeling her age and things weren’t as easy as they once were,” says Parks.
Dietrich wasn’t nostalgic herself, so playwright Gems uses the nervous moments of the performer preparing for her shows for her to reflect on a career which saw her celebrated and hated in Germany.
“She went all over the world entertaining Allied troops in the Second World War, which I didn’t know before,” says Parks, who feels that it was duty more than vanity which saw Dietrich continue to keep performing until 1975 when, a broken leg largely ended her career.
• Marlene, directed by Chris Monks, runs from tonight until June 18 and then returns at The Stephen Joseph Theatre from August 24 to September 3. Tickets: £10-£21. Box Office: 01723-370541 sjt.uk.com
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