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‘E“The biggest part is education,” says Linda Bassett. You learn about human feelings and weakness and decay. The writer puts their life on the page, and you live it. I’ve always felt like I’m the writer’s player.”
He is not wrong. Not doing anything fancy, Bassett’s magic enhanced the drama Timberlake WertenbakerWallace Shawn, Ayub Khan Din and, especially, Caryl Churchill, who is a translator like no other.
“Caryl’s test was great, because it got me going,” he says. From Fenn in 1983 to 2021’s What if If Onlyhis disturbing clarity has been associated with Churchill’s plays, a work that some people consider taboo. “It’s not hard to see,” says Bassett.
We’re hanging out at the Young Vic, where Bassett is rehearsing Care with Alexander Zeldin, another difficult writer. His dog is sleeping nearby and I show him my bag of “terrible rage”, quoting Bassett’s terrible words from Churchill’s apocalyptic. He ran away alonewhen the word is said 25 times in a row. “At that time, I just said it.” The words strengthened the heart, and it was the listeners who heard, not me, what was right.”
On repeat, Churchill is “strange, unruffled, but very generous”. The gameplay is very short on stages, which offer several options. “It’s very diluted, there’s not much stock,” Bassett thinks. “But there’s only one way to play them, and you have to find a way.”
Theater wasn’t an obvious path for Bassett (“we weren’t that kind of family”), but the seed was planted during an Easter play at her Sunday school. One older girl couldn’t keep up, but four-year-old Linda knew all the lines, was pushed into a daffodil hat and “fell down a storm because I was young.
Young Linda spent two years leading the way at the Old Vic during Laurence Olivier’s glory days of the seminal role: “I saw it over and over again, except for the time it was about to go, when I had to go and get an ice cream.” He recalls Peter Brook’s production of Seneca’s Oedipus. “Ronald Pickupmessenger voice – people faint every night. You didn’t see anything, his words were enough. It’s the power of theater, isn’t it?
He then studied English at the University of Leeds, for just one year. “I spent all my time doing plays” – animalistic things like Beckett’s Plays and Edward Bond’s Lear. “There was a very good doctor, and I went to him and told him that I was afraid of this test and I didn’t do the work, and he asked me: ‘Do you want to stay? I thought, No, I just reached my father. He said: ‘In that case, make sure you go in, write your name so that you don’t lose your support, and I will give you Librium to endure the fear.’ I first found it in my playbook, and nothing else. “
Instead, in Leeds and Coventry, he created a job that, he thinks, “made me happy. When I’m working on a new play – not with Caryl or Alex, but other writers – I make ideas, and then I realize that they don’t really want it.”
Bassett didn’t do as much as he’d hoped – “I think I was seen as a bit of a sportsman” – but his CV is nothing short of impressive. He said: “I don’t think I’m making ordinary decisions. I’ve reduced my assets.”
Although she has starred in popular films (East Is East, Calendar Girls), most know her as the cruel nurse Phyllis in the BBC’s Call the Midwife. “Strangers come and say, I love you, my wife loves you, my mother loves you, it’s unusual.” Although there were twists and turns (“he suddenly made me an atheist, when in my head, I was a Unitarian Methodist. That was amazing”), he lived with Phyllis for more than ten years. “I kept thinking, 12 years is a long time to play one character, I have to get out. But there was always something to find. I didn’t agree with him – he was more important and useful than me. It was refreshing to learn to be like that.”
Care also involves social sensitivity and individual experiences. Bassett plays Joan, who after helping her family, shows signs of dementia and needs to take care of herself. “He believes, as most people do, that he will get some rest.”
Zeldin’s game is quietly destroying it. Joan’s story may seem domestic, but, Bassett insists, “it’s on a Shakespearean (scale), because she’s attacking the world. Is dementia difficult to play? “What’s difficult is remembering the lines because they’re connected.”
He got a taste of Joan’s depression when, after a heart attack, she spent two weeks recovering in a care home in her Kentish village. “It made me realize what it’s like when you’re helpless.” Staying in London for the play also allows him to “get used to what it’s like to be removed.
Zeldin directs his play: “He’s looking for the real truth, which pleases me on the ground,” says Bassett. “Every new chapter you’re starting over. It’s scary, but I think it’s going to be okay.”
