It’s not a glamorous part – as an ageing housewife sinking into dementia – but Alison Steadman finds it’s a role to Enjoy, she tells Viv Hardwick.

ALAN Bennett’s play Enjoy was so badly received in 1980 that he joked about calling it Endure instead. So it was hardly surprising to learn from actress Alison Steadman that the world-famous playwright sneaked unannounced into a performance last year just to see what all the fuss was about.

“When the play was first done, it wasn’t very successful and our director, Christopher Luscombe, took it and cut about half an hour, with Alan Bennett’s permission. When he came to see it I think he didn’t really notice and just felt ‘well it works’ and was really chuffed,” she says.

“He came on stage and spoke to us all and was really thrilled. I think if he hadn’t have liked the play, he’d have slunk away and pretended he hadn’t seen it, and sent a polite letter.

He came to a matinee at the Gielgud Theatre and he had his photograph taken with us,” says Steadman.

She and West End co-star David Troughton have followed the extended London run with a near soldout tour, which takes in Newcastle Theatre Royal next week.

“I’m pleased for Alan because it’s the failures that you remember most of all. I can tell you my bad reviews but I couldn’t quote you a good one.

When you get a bad review it stays with you for ever,” she says.

Enjoy focuses on the plight of Wilf and Connie, who are faced with being rehoused after a decision to knock down their back-to-back Leeds home. Then Bennett’s eye for the absurd takes over as officialdom suggests turning the house and its inhabitants into a living museum.

Steadman, 63, admits this is one of her toughest stage roles, with Connie off-stage for only five minutes and with a script devoted to her declining mental health through dementia.

“I’ve never played Newcastle before and apparently we’re just about sold out on the whole tour. That’s great because this is down to word of mouth and the name of Alan Bennett,”

she says. “This play hasn’t been done a lot before and people are eager to see it.

“The main thing is that when you get a script from him you’re guaranteed that it’s going to be decent writing.

I was thrilled to bits to be offered this play.

“I was previously in Bennett’s Kafka’s Dick (1986) and I was in the film by him called A Private Function (1984).

“This play is warm and it’s also funny but it’s also very dark and frightening at times because it’s about real life. My character has the early stages of dementia and we all know that a percentage of us are going to get it.

“The audiences laugh at it and recognise it but also laugh out of fear because ‘it might happen to me’. People do see themselves. I haven’t got knowledge of dementia from my own family but I have some elderly friends who I’ve visited in care homes and, of course, one sees people in various stages of dementia.

Alan also knew about it because his mother had dementia and he really wrote with first-hand knowledge,”

she says.

Asked about taking on the tour, Steadman says: “These kind of parts don’t come around very often. This was quite a challenge for me and being on tour is quite tiring. When you’re young you bomb around the country but, when you get into your Sixties you want your home comforts.

But taking it on the road for eight weeks was worth doing. I said I’d only do it if David Troughton would and he said the same about me… so thank God for Mr Bennett.”

■ Enjoy, Newcastle Theatre Royal, Monday-Saturday. Box Office: 08448-112-121 theatreroyal.co.uk