The Lady in the Van is becoming the ideal comedy vehicle for Nichola McAuliffe. She talks to Viv Hardwick about playing Alan Bennett’s ultimate bag lady.

SO you’ve moved from the Truck to the Van, I observe to Nichola McAuliffe about becoming the incredible Mary Shepherd, Alan Bennett’s real life Lady In The Van. It has taken to the road thanks to a re-fuelled production from Hull Truck.

McAuliffe laughs uproariously and, sadly for me, it’s probably the highest octane part of the conversation.

She’s late getting to the theatre as planned and is conducting our interview on her mobile and, at that moment, her thought process is shattered by the sounds of a group of excitable youngsters.

“Always keep away from small children,” she observes wryly.

I’d heard that Bennett had picked McAuliffe, who has moved successfully between West End comedy, Royal Shakespeare Company productions, TV and her own onewoman shows, from a short-list of possible performers.

“Yes, apparently that’s true. My ego is bigger than the Liver building at the moment, near where I’ve playing at the moment,” she jokes.

“I met Alan Bennett many, many years ago at an Evening Standar awards evening, but I haven’t seen him since then. We correspond occasionally,”

she says. The Lady In The Van focuses on Bennett’s fascinating decision to assist a woman in a broken down van in the early Seventies, when he lived in Camden. He ended up with its occupant living in a collection of vehicles in his front garden for the next 15 years. Bennett’s see-saw relationship with Miss Shepherd, and her efforts to conceal the real reasons for her bizarre life on the road, became a book and then this stageplay.

Bennett summed up his inability to end his observation of Miss Shepherd’s plight, which he freely admits was done for literary purposes, with the thought: “There was a gap between our social position and our social obligations. It was in this gap that Miss Shepherd (in her van) was able to live”. Miss Shepherd died in 1989.

So how did McAuliffe approach the play in the light that she was to become a person who really existed in this extraordinary fashion.

“I put the costume on, learned the lines and get out there and try not to trip over parts of the van. It’s not a process one can really describe, it’s just what you do,” she responds.

So what was her view on Miss Shepherd. Did she think she was running away from something or just a victim of circumstance?

“I don’t understand your question.

I don’t have a view on Miss Shepherd.

“Going back to the question of how you prepare for a role, the minute you start entering into any kind of judgement then it’s impossible to present that character. You don’t get up every morning and judge the character you’re presenting unless you’re a psychopath, in which case you have to judge it fairly carefully because you’re presenting something that is totally false.

Literally, you do not make a judgement about your character, as long as the audience understands.

“I don’t want to like or dislike a character. I’m in no way interested in an audience’s judgement. All I’m interested in is that they understand the person better when they leave the theatre, and hopefully without the preconceptions that they walked in with,” she says.

McAuliffe then relents and observes that her character doesn’t feel that she was encroaching on Alan Bennett’s life at all.

“Not everybody and everything is a prop or a piece of scenery in her life,” she says.

The actress read the book as part of research for her role, but adds: “In the final analysis, when you are presenting someone who has been living you can become completely enslaved to that or you can use the pointers. I’m not six foot tall and she was six foot tall, so you have to say ‘thank you very much, those are the guidelines then’. After that you cherry- pick things like the way she moved in her wheelchair and the fact that she never wore stockings and you have to discard other stuff,” she says. Pushed on that subject, McAuliffe says that Bennett observed that Miss Shepherd didn’t have many skirts and had made one out of orange dusters.

“But once you end up in the world of changing costumes all the time it becomes a show about changing costumes and we made a decision very early on that this was irrelevant and frock-changing is a poor and dated way of showing time passing,” she explains.

It isn’t the first time that the actress best known for seven ITV series of Surgical Spirit, playing Sheila Sabatini, has played a bag lady like Miss Shepherd.

“The play Annie Wobbler was written for me by Arnold Wesker and she was an itinerant elderly lady, but she was an old Cockney and not like...” says McAuliffe.

I wait for the comment after the pause, but it never comes. The actress appears to have entered the theatre building and hit a phone signal blackspot. All attempts to phone her back fail.

The wheelchair-weaving Nichola McAuliffe, complete with van and truck, has moved on... destination Darlington.

• The Lady In The Van, Darlington Civic Theatre, Monday, June 13 to Saturday, June 18. Box Office: 01325-486555 darlingtonarts.co.uk

• The play offers two Alan Bennetts for the price of one. Paul Kemp is Alan 1, the hesitant but open-minded man we’d meet in the street. James Holmes is Alan 2, the confident and witty writer, his inner ego, who will ultimately commit these true events to paper.