 |
Torch Theatre Company's production of Who's Afraid of Rachel Roberts at Cardiff's Sherman Theatre.
|
All I really knew about the actress Rachel Roberts was that she was Welsh and she committed suicide in a terrible way. I knew she had acted in 60s 'kitchen sink' dramas but was unaware she was Oscar nominated for This Sporting Life and I didn't even know she was married to Rex Harrison. The only film I'd seen her in was Murder on the Orient Express, where she played a Teutonic, Countess's maid (where she reminds me of my GCSE Art teacher, but that's another story), a character part near the end of her career... and life.
Roberts was born in 1927; the daughter of a Welsh minister, who she adored, and a mother who rejected her at birth. She studied at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, became a BAFTA winner and an Oscar nominee but she more-or-less gave up acting to become a wife to Harrison, who called her Academy Award nominated part “a grubby role in a squalid film.” She failed to revive her stalled career in the 1970s, mainly acting in supporting roles, although the decade provided her with critical success, as the authoritarian head teacher of a Victorian girls' school in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and her third British Academy Film Award. In 1980, after discovering Rex Harrison had remarried, Roberts attempted suicide, for the fourth time, by swallowing barbiturates, and in a final act of tragedy she drank a caustic substance which propelled her through a decorative glass partition.
The play doesn't dwell on this although it is clear that it takes place on the day of her death, she kept her diary right up until the day she died; and she refers to her BAFTAs as awards for her suicide attempt.For the most part the play balances along the line between funny and tragic with Roberts relating high points of her life and marriage and changing to depression at the flick of a switch, traveling through comedic points to vulgarity back to comedy of her 'hellraising' ways; a particular example of this involving a dog at a Hollywood party (I shall say no more). Richards Burton and Harris are remembered as legends for their hellraising activities at the glitzy parties but maybe the same isn't thought of female hellraisers, maybe because, dare I say it, it just isn't ladylike? I suppose these days Roberts would be diagnosed as being bipolar.
 | |
|
Helen Griffin, another BAFTA winning Welsh actress plays Rachel Roberts and co-wrote this one woman play. She doesn't really look that much like her subject and as there is not much archive footage of Roberts on chat shows; the tapes of an infamous appearance on The Russel Harty show were destroyed; there is not that much footage of the real woman to compare her too, but that doesn't really matter. It is clear why Griffin won her BAFTA, and she portrays not only the dark side of Roberts but the fact that she really was actually a good actress. It takes a good actress to in turn portray another good actress, it also takes an excellent actress to switch back and forth between comedy and tragedy like she did for the majority of the performance. For a life so troubled this one-woman-play turned out to be (perhaps somewhat unexpectedly) entertaining, not at least due to the exceptional performance of Griffin!
