Cathy Shipton chats with Viv Hardwick about her interest in the supernatural and Philip Meeks’ new thriller which features the high profile world of the medium.

THE world of the seriously spooky has never been far from the life of actress Cathy Shipton, especially when she had a mother who, as a child, volunteered to sit with the dead.

“My mum brought us up as Catholics, but she also read the tea leaves, so I called her a pagan Catholic. We always had things like crossed fingers and a high level of superstition about walking under ladders and Friday the 13th in our home,” says the star of new touring work I Met A Man Who Wasn’t There.

“People used to come for readings by my mum because she came from deep in the Irish countryside. When she was about ten or 11, when a farmer died, and he was on his own, my mum would sit with the dead.

They’d put pennies on the eyes and she’d sit with them overnight if the dead had no relatives. My mum says she’s seen a spirit leave the house and stuff. I was aghast when she told me she’d stopped in the house, alone, with a dead person alongside the candles. But there does seem to be a much higher tolerance to life and death in the farming community because it’s part of a process,” says Shipton.

She once studied journalism and I ask her how it feels to finally experience the profession now that she’s playing an award-winning investigative writer who decides to track down once-famous psychic Edgar Rhyme (Brian Capron).

“I do quite like asking all the questions, I think it all goes down to my nosy nature,” jokes Shipton about playing Amanda Schilling, who has her own reasons for interviewing the psychic in this supernatural thriller from the pen of South Shields’ Philip Meeks – best-known as the creator of Emmerdale plotlines.

“I feel you have to work from the script and from the writer’s imagination.

The piece has two agendas.

What you see is a journalist interviewing a retired and quite famous medium and then they both have another agenda each. He also knew she was going to be there even before she walked through the door.

“My character had been a hardnosed Fleet Street hack in the Eighties and quite acerbic and then she changed after going to Bosnia. So I’ve been reading about Bosnia, which isn’t the easiest thing and it’s crucial because, while in Bosnia, she adopted a child,” explains the actress.

Here Meeks has used the famous 1996 incident where TV journalist Michael Nicholson adopted a nineyear- old orphan girl from the wartorn country as his inspiration. But even Meeks, points out Shipton, couldn’t have known that Ratko Mladic, the Serb war chief, would have resurfaced just as the first touring version of the play heads for Darlington’s Civic Theatre.

“The plays does operate on quite another surreal level which suits me because I’m a bit of a ghost-hunter.

Weird things start happening in the play which builds to a crescendo in the second half,” Shipton says of this first produced production.

The title itself is taken from the 1899 poem by US educator Hughes Mearns, who created the verse for a Harvard English class and based it on a ghost story about a house in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

“It’s a real gamble on the part of the producers to take out a new work in this climate because the audience, apart from knowing me and Brian and Philip’s TV writing, are not aware of this play. I think that Philip has fantastic imagination and use of language and it’s very exciting to be involved in a piece that’s new.

“I’ve toured in Agatha Christie plays that are sell-outs to 1,000 or 1,500 people, but they know most of her history. So a lot of selling has to go on here, but the audience response has been fantastic. I understand that the producers are keen to take this out again and it’s not too long, which I think people quite like.”

The thriller runs, with an interval, at about one hour 40 minutes with the first half acting as the slow-burn for the dramatic explosions in the second.

“And there’s only two of us onstage so we’ve really got our work cut out, particularly when it turns out that the psychic has been humouring me. The onus is on us, and particularly Brian, to create his dead wife and past career and former colleagues, plus even Uri Geller gets thrown in,” says Shipton.

She’s heard that since the economic downturn, the requests for help to mediums has boomed. The play sums it up by saying that people are addicted to voices from the supernatural particularly when the words of a previous tarot reading or spiritualist start to fade.

“People need another fix and if you’re that kind of person, you’re hooked for life. Business is booming because people are looking for comfort,”

says Shipton.

She’s still best-known as Duffy in popular BBC1 hospital drama series Casualty, and Shipton reveals that this led to her mother’s tales of dealing with the dead surfacing again.

“I was asked to do a TV documentary about a real Duffy who worked in hospital casualty, although he was a man, and I was pregnant and wearing scrubs. Nothing happened for three hours, then all hell broke loose and a man was brought in by the paramedics. For some reason they decided I was the person in charge and gave me all the info about this man who was dying after a heart attack.

The real guy was there getting all the information and he knew what he was doing. I was about seven months pregnant at the time and it left me with so much respect for the emergency services.

“That why I think if a programme like Casualty helps to raise the profile of medical workers then I’m just proud to have done that,” says Shipton.

􀁧 Brian Capron took over the role of Edgar Rhyme from Philip Madoc, who appeared in all the early publicity. Shipton says that Madoc did all the rehearsals and started the run and adds; “I was as surprised as anyone when the producer rang me and said ‘We’ve got the understudy on this week and we’re recasting’. Philip was fantastic in the role, but he has his personal reasons for dropping out.

Brian is very different and comes at the role from a different direction, but makes it work. So this is a testament to the writing. Brian was playing in the tour of Columbo and finished on the Saturday and started rehearsing on the Easter Monday.”

􀁧 I Met A Man Who Wasn’t There, Darlington Civic Theatre, Tues- Saturday. Tickets: £15-£22.50.

Box Office: 01325-486555 darlingtonarts.co.uk