I'm very scared of being back on stage

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10 April 2012

On our way to the restaurant in Heal's on Tottenham Court Road, Dame Maggie Smith and I somehow get lost in the bedding department. "You've booked a table, haven't you?" she mutters loudly, "or is it a room?" We've popped across the road from the church hall where she is rehearsing Edward Albee's The Lady from Dubuque, a play that folded on Broadway in 1980 after 12 performances - either it was ahead of its time or just too mysterious for critics and audiences.

Dame Maggie orders a glass of water. That's it. The Dame does not do interviews, on the whole, and she certainly doesn't do them to have fun at a lunch table. As usual, she is fraught with anxiety. As Pauline Kael said of Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, she raises anxiety to an art form. And she has been ill with flu.

"I think they all think I'm going to die. And I might. I'm very scared about the stage at the moment. I've always been scared, actually, but I didn't know I'd be this scared. Perhaps it will be all right on the night. Well, it won't be on the first night, but afterwards, perhaps." I think it's being so cheerful that keeps her going.

She may not have been as high-profile of late as her fellow dames, Judi Dench and Oscar-winning Helen Mirren - "Isn't that great? Helen and Jude really have cornered the market in queens, haven't they? I only get the odd duchess, and a wizard, of course" - but next Tuesday she returns to the London stage as an uninvited guest from an Iowa backwater, a lady so mysterious that no one can agree who she is.

She arrives, with a suited attendant called Oscar, at the end of the first act, wondering whether or not she is in the right place at the right time. The hostess of a raucous drinks party is seriously ill, and the suburban guests - two other couples - have been tearing each other to shreds for an hour or so.

The mysterious guest might be an angel of death, or she might be the dying woman's mother. Was that enough information to build a convincing character? Did Dame Maggie believe her own role? "Well, Albee gives you a wonderful text, but he also gives you explicit stage directions. You might just have a name, but you know about this woman by the end of the play. His plays are fiendish to learn, but they do play like music. It's sort of like a roundelay."

Having excelled in Albee's Three Tall Women (as the author's mother, dying in bed) and A Delicate Balance (ripping up the stage as Eileen Atkins's drunk sister), Dame Maggie is likely to adorn the Haymarket stage with her customary elegance and cutting edge in a play that combines high comedy with a mood of bleak classical tragedy. The title role is the ironic opposite of what New Yorker founding editor Harold Ross implied when defining his average reader: "One thing I know, the magazine is not going to be written for the little old lady from Dubuque."

Unusually, the characters in the play make deliberate asides to the audience, highlighting the artificiality of the medium. This reminds me of something Tom Stoppard once said about Maggie Smith, that she can inhabit a character totally while standing outside of it with an ironic commentary - "an impossible trick, like being in two places at once". So does she agree, then, with Albee's view that there is no such thing as naturalism in the theatre, merely degrees of stylisation?

"Did he really say that? How odd. I suppose he's right, only you try and make everything natural, like Gerald Du Maurier." Du Maurier (father of Daphne) was the godfather of light comic acting, the school of Wilfrid Hyde-White and Rex Harrison. "I know we're really not allowed to talk about dead people any more; well, I'm sorry, then I've got no conversation. I do find I'm talking about the dead most of the time."

Maybe the play is to blame, for if there's one thing you can say for sure about The Lady from Dubuque, it's about dying. Dame Maggie, as neat and small as a bird, with her trademark mop of beautifully cut, glossy red hair, is a remarkably spry 72-year-old.

And like her great friend and contemporary (three weeks older) Judi Dench - "I don't know anyone who possesses energy like hers. I'd give anything for an ounce of it" - she has enjoyed an Indian summer on film while living the life of a not very merry widow.

First married to the late Robert Stephens in 1967 during her glory days at Laurence Olivier's National Theatre, she lost her second husband, the writer Beverley Cross, nine years ago. She is delighted that Cross's translation of Boeing Boeing is such a current hit; she saw and admired the production last week and it brought back memories of happy times in the early Sixties when the play was at the Apollo on Shaftesbury Avenue and she was next door in the Globe (now the Gielgud) in an early Peter Shaffer double-bill (The Private Ear and The Public Eye) with Kenneth Williams.

She and Cross were in love, but she dropped him for a passionate affair with, and marriage to, Stephens (they had two sons, the actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens) before hooking up again with Cross, in true fairytale fashion, a decade later. Had she got over the loss of the strong, silent and devoted man who was her bulwark against the intrusions of the world?

"Everbody says it gets better but I don't think it does. It gets different." Her eyes have suddenly filled and reddened. "Jane Birkin's mother, Judy Campbell, once said an extraordinary thing to me when her husband died; that it was a strange feeling you were not number one with anybody. I have many good friends. But I tend to keep to myself anyway. It's odd, doing things and having no one to share them with."

So she stays alone but settled in the well-concealed West Sussex farmhouse where Beverley used to make homegrown, lethal cider, and in the Fulham townhouse she has kept for 40 years. And she survives not only without Beverley, but also without her thyroid. She suffered for a while from Graves disease and, after surgery, is on medication for life. One big comfort is that Chris, the 40-yearold elder son, is appearing with her in the Albee play. "I had no idea he'd auditioned, and I got the shock of my life when the director, Anthony Page, rang me from New York about it. I hope he's going to be good!" Her second son, Toby, also gave her a shock when he appeared cavorting naked in The Camomile Lawn on television years ago: "I hadn't seen his willy since he was about two!" Both sons are married and both about to be fathers (Chris already is); "Yes, I really am a Granny Smith at last."

It has been an incredibly long haul for the girl from Essex (she was born, like Gertrude Lawrence and Ian Holm, in Ilford) who made her name in student revues at Oxford, then on Broadway and in the West End, where she was a shooting star even before the Olivier NT era.

On stage she has worked with Orson Welles and Noël Coward, and on film (she won two Oscars, for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite opposite Michael Caine) with Hollywood royalty from Richard Burton and Peter Ustinov to Alec Guinness and George Cukor.

And yet her greatest film performance might be the one in which she revealed the true depth of her talent for tragedy as the guilt-ridden Catholic spinster in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne 20 years ago.

Her characteristic blend of piercing wit leavened with sudden shafts of sadness has made her a prime exponent of Alan Bennett, but film roles no longer challenge her. Which of the Harry Potter films, in which she plays Professor McGonagall - "Miss Jean Brodie in a wizard's hat" - does she like most? "Is it five, now? I seem to be doing less and less. I liked the first one when I changed from a cat. The thing is, as I get older, the film roles seem to get smaller."

She is full of admiration for Becoming Jane, next week's new film about Jane Austen. She plays Lady Gresham - "don't blink, or you'll miss it" - trying to marry off her nephew, played by Laurence Fox, to the young vicar's daughter before she wrote Pride and Prejudice. Fox, currently previewing in Treats opposite Billie Piper, is the son of James and nephew of Robert, the producer on the Albee play.

"He's very good, very Foxy, that Laurence. It was fun doing the film. It was in Ireland, of course, on a shoestring, no time, the usual."

As we leave the restaurant to get lost in Heal's once again, she dares me not to leave a tip on the silver salver. The tip I leave is larger than the bill for two meagre drinks.

"Isn't that Ian Richardson?" she whispers, spotting a solo diner at a far table. He's dead, I say. "Don't you start."

The Lady from Dubuque previews from Tuesday at the Haymarket Theatre Royal (0870 4000 626) and runs until 9 June.

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I'm very scared of being back on stage

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