Chekhov’s Irena Arkadina juggles her life. She has to. She’s an actress and the trade has become seriously overcrowded. This is 19th-century Russia. There is a handful making good money but the rest are struggling, and treated little better than hookers; rotten pay and you have to supply your own costumes. Plus, she is a single mother, devoted to her son Konstantin, but also trying to make proper space for her lover. Work, kids, relationships, it never ends.
“It’s beyond juggling,” says the actress Juliet Stevenson of Arkadina’s life. She knows what she is talking about since she is now inhabiting the character of The Seagull’s stressed heroine in the National Theatre’s imminent production. Of course the similarities fall away, yet certain tensions remain, never entirely erased by prosperity, professional help and the passage of a century. The hazards now are the very early starts and the school runs; the sense that well-planned routines can suddenly be made to look rickety by the smallest mishap, particularly in a place the size of London. Then there is the real if slightly less tangible problem of leaving this world behind for Planet Chekhov.
This is a place which actors have found both professionally demanding and emotionally seductive since the first productions of the four great plays between 1896 and 1904. “I find it easier to manage,” says Stevenson, “when I’m not doing something as totally immersing as this. The longing to submerge yourself in this material and not have to come out of it is so great that it is sometimes difficult to pull yourself out at the end of the day. It is when you are in this immersed state that things often come to you — lateral thoughts, images and ideas. Sometimes I don’t want to leave the room when rehearsals are over, but hang around a bit longer, just stay in the bath water.”
It is a short step from here to the Cyril Connolly question. He was the critic who said with bleak frankness: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” Are young children and the creative process inevitably at war with one another? “Obviously I don’t feel that,” she replies. “But I am very conscious of feeling that I don’t do either thing well enough. There are limits on my time to work outside the rehearsal room, whereas before I had children I was able to remain almost permanently in that immersion. You do struggle, and there is the danger of losing confidence in yourself in all these roles. But, more importantly, there is a way in which having children enriches and extends your emotional and psychological vocabulary. Parenthood affords you all kinds of experience and feelings that you draw on continually, and I don’t know what I would do without it.”
Arkadina’s problems remain of a different order. For a start she is being pulled between the requirements of her son — two decades too old for a pram but infantilised nonetheless — and those of her lover, the self-loving literary lion Trigorin. Her very humanity seems to have been impaired by her long association with the theatre. Even as Chekhov lays out the terms of the broader conflict between old art, as embodied by the couple, and new, in the persons of Konstantin and the young actress Nina Zarechnaya, he also suggests that the younger woman is doomed to go the way of the older one. In this respect the text of The Seagull stands as a caution to the very trade that is charged with animating it.
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Stevenson has fought against such hazards like the lioness that she resembles. She seldom does more than one stage play a year, and her choices read like a protest at the very notion of pigeonholing. Before The Seagull there was her virtually solo tour de force in Tom Murphy’s Alice Trilogy at the Royal Court; before that Imogen Stubbs’s We Happy Few, an alarming flop through no fault of Stevenson’s; Noël Coward’s Private Lives; and, apparently the most intimidating of all, Sondheim’s A Little Night Music in New York.
“I’ve been working for 27 years, or something like that,” she says. “I just can’t enjoy the work if it isn’t challenging. You have to keep yourself hungry. The danger is that you start repeating yourself, working with the same material, using the same areas of yourself, or relying on known skills.
“For a very long time I’ve consciously tried to avoid doing that, though not very successfully. Maybe I’ve even started worrying about this before I need to, but it’s something I’ve long been aware of — the dangers of getting trapped by formula and habit. Even in my twenties, when people started saying ‘Juliet Stevenson the RSC actress’, or ‘Juliet Stevenson the classical actress’, I thought, right, I’m out of here. Before the labels could stick indelibly I would slide away. It’s good to do things that you are scared of.”
Hence the Sondheim, which was three years ago. “I thought, Here I am heading for New York. Sondheim in New York! A 52-piece orchestra, the Lincoln Centre. Three thousand-seat opera house. Me and Jeremy Irons. I mean, what a cheek. Everyone else was a serious singer.”
It was 16 years ago that she started to become a public face. Already compared at the RSC with Peggy Ashcroft for her impassioned playing of Shakespeare heroines, notably Rosalind in As You Like it, she starred opposite John Malkovich in the 1990 West End production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This. The following year she co-starred with Alan Rickman in Anthony Mingella’s film Truly, Madly, Deeply, and took the lead in Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden. With Hedda Gabler just before this winning streak and Nora in a TV version of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House to follow, she was doing a brisk trade in spirited victims while somehow managing to offer the possibility of some redemptive wit in the darkest of passes.
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Her partner, and father of her 11-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son, is the anthropologist Hugh Brody. In 2004 he was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies. This means that he is away from their North London home for several weeks of the year — a shorter absence than those often required in the past for his work with indigenous communities.
With her two older brothers, one of whom was killed in a road accident five years ago, she was brought up on Army bases from Europe to Australia, her father being a brigadier with the Royal Engineers. She went to the same hyper-English boarding school in Berkshire as Sarah Ferguson. She hasn’t the strident poshness of the Duchess of York, but rather that subverted county manner common to well-bred artists. It speaks of decency, and is probably responsible for her being labelled a luvvie in the past for her broad-ranging activism.
Now 49, she remains close and devoted to her widowed mother, who lives in Chichester. If it is her lot to turn into her, she sounds as if she will have no regrets. From the daughter’s description of her, 81-year-old Virginia Stevenson is bright and energetic, with an undimmed social consciousness.
She talks about the possibility of a major role shift, so major that it would entail leaving acting altogether. “My mother was often using her time to help people,” she says. “She would take disabled children riding, that sort of thing. Wherever we were stationed, she would seek these activities out. She still does. I spoke to her this morning and she has a meeting every night of this week. She has always been aware of the world beyond her own circumstances, and maybe something of that rubbed off on me. I like to feel that I’m participating in life. I sometimes think what a great idea it would be to retrain, to mend people, to do cataract operations, to be of more practical use. I keep wondering whether in the time I have left . . . I’m not sure I’ll be acting when I’m 70. Maybe I will because I’ll discover that I’m not very good at anything else. Maybe the profession will chuck me out long before then.”
Unlikely. She returns to the job in hand. “Arkadina is a woman chased by and trapped by time. In her very first exchange she is trying to divert a conversation which is focusing on her distant past. She has lost her youth. What do you do when you have appetites that are as hungry and as energised as ever, but the world is telling you that you are not meant to have those expectations any more? I am much less pre-occupied than she is, but I’m still conscious of these things.
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It’s more of a slow burn, and it can be a painful process. After all, you’re born young. Youth is there, like oxygen and the sky and the River Thames. You don’t even think about it until suddenly . . .”
If she is starting to sound like a Chekhov heroine it’s surely not because she is turning into one but because she is about to re-immerse herself for the afternoon.
The Seagull, Lyttelton Theatre, South Bank, SE1 (www.nationaltheatre.org.uk 020-7452 3000), opens June 24