KEY POINTS:
If anyone had the right to rail against bloody tourists, it is Frances Barber: one of them put her in hospital and almost cost her a plum job.
Barber is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company ensemble, coming to Wellington and Auckland in August with productions of Chekhov's The Seagull (in which she takes the principal role of Arkadina) and King Lear (she is Lear's scheming daughter Goneril).
Yet her assumption of both roles was delayed when she was badly injured in a fall from a bicycle during the plays' preview seasons at Stratford-upon-Avon in March.
"Stratford is always swarming with tourists," she says, nimbly avoiding any pejorative adjective. "I've got an old lady's bike with a basket on the front and I was riding at about walking pace and this woman, who may not have been looking where she was going, walked into me and pushed me inadvertently into the line of traffic. So to try and avoid getting run over I did a 360-degree turn and consequently was terribly twisted when I landed on my knee."
It didn't take long for the 49-year-old actress to realise that "I'd done something terrible, because I could hardly walk." As it turned out she had ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee. It's a footballer's injury - England's Michael Owen and All Black Jason Eaton are recent notable victims - and not one generally associated with classical actresses. But because it was initially misdiagnosed, she soldiered on.
"Each time I walked on stage I ruptured it further. I did six performances and then it snapped - on stage. I literally crawled off. And the surgeon, who, I think you'll be amused to hear, is called Shakespeare, said he had to operate immediately.
"It was," she concludes mildly, "a very upsetting time."
Almost two months on, Barber is well-ensconced in her roles, thanks to an orthopaedic moon-boot which is fortunately hidden beneath both characters' sumptuous costumes.
Barber does not have the household-name status at this end of the world that the top-of-the-bill Sir Ian McKellen enjoys, but she is highly regarded in British theatrical circles, having played roles as diverse as Pygmalion's Eliza and Lady Macbeth for the RSC, the National and the Royal Court. And she is loving one of the best roles an actress in her 40s can land. Arkadina, one of the theatre's great mothers from hell, is a rare commodity: a lead character who is complex, scheming, charismatic - and, despite being well over 40, a creature of sexual appetite.
"She's a monster and a dream," Barber agrees. "She's not very good at being a mother. She's selfish and solipsistic - but she's capable of being tender."
The role has had something of a revival of late. In the past year, Juliet Stevenson at the National and Kristin Scott Thomas at the Royal Court have taken it on in strikingly different interpretations (respectively neurotic and controlled, according to reviews). Barber, who, chuckling, remarks that "we have had a bit of a flock of Seagulls", says her Arkadina, in the hands of director Trevor Nunn, is funny.
"Trevor has really concentrated on the comic elements. Chekhov does describe the play on the title page as a comedy in four acts. A lot of the Chekhov I've seen has been a bit like Withnail [in the film Withnail and I] described it - 'a bunch of old women moaning about ducks flying home to Moscow'. Our production isn't like that at all; it really is very funny indeed. Other people's predicaments, even when their hearts are broken, can be very funny."
The play is essentially about a group of people looking for love in all the wrong places. Barber remarks that someone "cleverly described it as a daisy chain: A loves B, but B loves C and so on."
But, in true Chekovian style, there is a tragedy underpinning the comedy. Not a few critics have noted that Arkadina - a solo mother juggling with an acting career, an emotionally needy son and a younger lover - is, if not strikingly modern, a 19th century character who looks very different to audiences in the 21st. The possibilities offered by an RSC production are tantalising indeed.
McKellen, who takes a relatively small role, as Arkadina's brother Sorin, in The Seagull, remarks that actors "absolutely adore being in the plays".
"That's one of the reasons there are so many productions of Chekhov. I've been in The Seagull about six times. And it is about actors, of course: Frances plays an actor, I play her brother who would like to have been a performer, there's the young girl who is trying to get into the theatre, and there is the famous playwright who she meets and falls in love with. So we understand these people, we recognise them in ourselves and in our friends."
Barber also plays Lear's eldest daughter Goneril, the first to challenge his eccentric decision to renounce his crown and, with a retinue of 100 knights, divide his time between her and her sister Regan.
She says Nunn has called for a Goneril who starts out "trying to be the older sister and be reasonable" but turns ugly when he curses her and wishes that she should be barren.
"We are assuming Goneril is childless and that Lear knew that this was the one thing that would really hurt her."
Barber remembers that the first time they rehearsed that scene, there were tears.
"It was so unexpected - and so vicious. It was one of those lovely moments that happen in the rehearsal room when you go, 'Oh my goodness. What happened there?'."
It underlined how Lear is "not a pantomime about two ugly sisters and a beautiful one". It is a majestic tragedy with titanic, cosmic overtones, but it is also a family drama.
"There are times in families when a row erupts, that someone can say something and it will never be forgiven; it will always tinge the relationship from then on. That's what happens here."
ON STAGE
Who: Actress Frances Barber, in the Royal Shakespeare Company's King Lear and The Seagull
Where and when: Aotea Centre, Aug 18-25 and Aug 19-26
