Undressed for success

10 April 2012

The realisation that her parents - John Alderton and Pauline Collins - were Britain's best-loved couple on stage and screen dawned slowly on little Kate Alderton.

'It was more of a case of gradually finding out that everybody else's parents didn't do that. Apparently, I used to go round to other kids' houses and ask to see videos of their mums and dads.'

Years later, when 29-year-old Alderton began to feel her own acting ambitions, she received a combination of unconditional support and realistic advice. 'I'm pretty sure they were secretly pleased I wanted to go into their profession. Today, as always, they're terribly supportive. My brother Nick, who writes and directs, is currently developing a series for TV called The Brothers Present. We all chipped in to film a pilot, so the last time I worked with Mum and Dad, I watched my mum sexually assault one of my best friends, while my dad got stuck into a cocaine mountain on a boardroom table. You see, utterly normal parents.'

And next time her parents go to see Alderton she will be naked and performing a threesome - an utterly normal daughter.

Alderton can currently be seen in Peepshow, the latest production from dance/drama/physical theatre group Frantic Assembly. A voyeuristic glimpse into the real and fantasy lives of seven people, set in the cross section of an urban tower block, and studded with songs by cult electronica band Lamb, Peepshow's opening image has steel doors sliding slowly back to reveal Alderton's naked form, back to the audience, motionless on a stool.

'On our first night, the one thing I wasn't prepared for happened. The place filled with laughter. It was torture, I sat there, completely still, thinking ''What is it? Have I got loo roll stuck to my backside?'''

A little artistic mooning at overexcited school groups, says Alderton, is one of the smaller challenges she took on when she joined the production. 'I have to sing, dance and be very drunk for much of it. At my first audition, I felt very, very out of my depth. I have no dance training and there were a lot of really difficult steps. And the singing scared me witless - I did it with my eyes closed. But the directors and choreographer made it easy.

'Rehearsals began with lots of exercises rolling around on the floor together, so we would get used to each other physically. There's a sex scene, and instead of telling us "Right. Make a threesome!", which would have been pretty intimidating, they started us crawling around, smelling each other, really, really slowly. Believe me, it didn't feel sexual at all.'

The deep end has been Alderton's principal address since she graduated from Lamda in 1995. Embarking on the inevitable grind of fruitless auditions, sporadically adding to a portfolio of stage and television work - Charley's Aunt and The Powder Keg, TV's The Bill and Noah's Ark - Alderton and a group of friends stayed busy forming and joining various nobudget fringe companies, putting on pub theatre and multimedia events. 'We all got tired of not working. And we discovered that you get to play more when you work for each other, which is, for me, what it's all about.'

Joining an arts collective called Temporary Autonomous Zone which took over an empty building in Hampstead, Alderton and colleagues put on acting workshops, singing workshops, yoga tuition, kids' events, massage.

Frustratingly, however, they could never secure a licence to perform there for an audience. 'So we invented Bus Stop Theatre,' she explains. 'There was a huge plate glass window in the space, and through it we performed a weekly soap opera for the commuters at the bus stop outside. There were lots of giant, brightly-coloured props and plenty of big acting.

Another labour of love, lasting four years, was The Warp, a legendary, 24-hour, pyschedelic play cycle co-created and championed by Ken Campbell --the actor-comedian, best-known as Alf Garnett's neighbour Fred Johnson in Till Death Us Do Part, who coincidentally introduced Alderton's parents when he cast them both in his play, One Night I Danced With Mr Dalton in the Sixties. Warp traces a man's search for enlightenment across five decades. Alderton appeared in 20

Needless to say, dialogue was a little limited.' productions of the play, taking on anywhere between 16 and 25 roles each time.

'Once, one of the lead actresses dropped out because she got a 'proper job', and I had to learn lead roles in seven of the plays in a week. And didn't drop a line. Yay!'

For Alderton, a personal pivotal moment remains a deeply experimental retelling of The Tempest, one of two plays in which she appeared for the Actors' Touring Company in 1999 and 2000. Covering four roles in all, she played Caliban as a disembodied mouth floating on a screen above Prospero's head, and her Miranda spoke in a mix of distorted speech and live, electronic sound effects.

'What was brilliant was that was the first time I felt I'd really impressed my parents. It was a million miles from anything they'd ever done, but they totally got it. I think they thought it the bravest thing I'd ever done. No one has ever put any pressure on me to live up to their success, but you can't help comparing yourself to what they were doing at that age, and how high profile they had already become. The Tempest really felt like the my first step towards carving my own kind of career.'

Peepshow, until Sat 23 Nov, Lyric Hammersmith, 2 King Street, London W6 (020-8741 2311).

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Undressed for success

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