LINDSAY DUNCAN

Interview

Gustav Temple meets Lindsay Duncan to discuss her part as Jane Digby in Around the World in 80 Days, as well as working with Alan Rickman on Noel Coward’s Private Lives

“If anyone else played Lady Hester Stanhope or Jane Digby I’d be furious. Digby is so far away from me but God, what a woman!”

ou’ve been filming Around the

YWorld in 80Days in South Africa, I believe? Just one episode, a long time ago now, in fact pre-pandemic.

Well that’s ruined my second question, which was ‘what was it like filming with pandemic measures?’ I’ve done quite a lot of filming with pandemic measures, actually. When I went out to South Africa in February 2020, there were already rumblings about something. I’d just been on a plane with hundreds of people and I actually went and bought some hand sanitizer for the first time ever. The chemist told me it was flying off the shelves and I thought, this is weird! I was sufficiently anxious to take wipes to clean things down on the plane. Then I saw the huge queue at Cape Town Airport. Everybody was having their temperature taken, even though they hadn’t had a single case yet. Then, the day I left, the first case in Johannesburg was announced and life changed forever.

You’re playing Jane Digby, English aristocrat famed for her remarkable lifestyle and love life who ended up living in Syria married to Arab prince Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab. Yes, I was so excited when I read the script, because I already knew about her. A guy called Joe Boyd recommended a book to me years ago called The Wilder Shores of Love by Lesley Blanche. Joe had met this wonderful eccentric woman Lesley, who writes accounts of women who led extraordinary lives. It’s odd that one of them ended up in the adaptation

Photo: Joe Alblas

of a book that preceded her life. I got such a frisson from this Jane Digby. What a good idea to flip her into this episode of the series of Around the World in 80 Days.

It won’t come as any surprise that I loved doing this production. It was only disappointing that I wasn’t in a whole series about Jane Digby! Because there is so much rich material there, both in her character and her life. I was also taken by the fact that on Desert Island Discs, Arsene Wenger said he would take Around the World in 80 Days as his book. How about that for a recommendation, because he’s quite a guy.

Have you heard of a woman called Lady Hester Stanhope? I have, she was referred to in the account of Jane Digby’s life. She was a great traveller, wasn’t she? She was known as the Queen of the Desert. When she rode into Damascus dressed in her best finery and faced down the suspicious locals, one sheikh said “What can we do with her? After all, she is not merely a woman.” I heard there is a film about her in development, The Lady Who Went Too Far.

I’m bewildered that they haven’t called me yet! If anyone else played her or Jane Digby I’d be furious. Digby is so far from away from me but God, what a woman! Enabled, like Hester Stanhope, by her income, she also had the confidence of someone with her upbringing, combined with her character, and acted out her incredibly romantic approach to life and relationships. The world was something she could not resist; she just wanted more and more of it and she was able to do that. Someone poor wouldn’t have been able to trot around Europe,

Photo: Joe Alblas

having love affairs with half of the royalty. Jane Digby could that, but she certainly had a character that required feeding. This period of her life that’s in the series was by all accounts her happiest, and it was the life that was furthest away from her own.

She lived in the desert and learned everything about that. She added Arabic to her eight other languages, learned to ride camels. Even though I suppose an aristocratic country woman would be pretty well equipped, it doesn’t mean you can live in the desert with other tribes.

I think she was friends with Sir Richard Burton, wasn’t she? Yes, and like him she was a great linguist. If there was anything missing in her education, she quickly hoovered it up, learning not only to speak but also to read all those languages. The reason she was

“Navigating the desert is nothing like stomping across the fields in rural England. No afternoon tea and putting your feet up. You’d be sleeping with your beloved sheik in a tent the whole time. I’d love to think I could because I’m romantically attached to the idea, but I know that I’d be screaming for a taxi after a while”

in Syria in the first place was because her heart had been broken yet again. She was interested

in archaeology and actually knew what she was talking about. This was a woman who was having a dazzling love life but was also doing substantial things. She could not have been respected by the tribes and families she met unless she had been impressive. Some white woman dithering about in the desert because she fancied this guy would not have played well. There was an enormous amount of pride in those tribes, for their culture and their way of life. And she subscribed to it so completely and with such respect for them. Her relationship with her last husband and great love was because of their mutual interests and shared respect, and how amazing that it all happened in the 19th century!

In her more familiar milieu, eventually her family were embarrassed. She was considered to have gone a little too far. And when she married an Arab, that was too much for the family. She knew what it was to be reviled by certain sections of society and that would have been very painful. But having gone to a completely different world, it was a clean slate for her. She was embedded. When they weren’t living in the desert they were living in Damascus, so they were still basically in an Arab world. She didn’t want anything else. You couldn’t take many aristocratic women from the

Photo: Joe Alblas

19th century away from their country piles and drop them in the desert. There would have been warfare kicking off all the time. Navigating the desert is nothing like stomping across the fields in rural England. No afternoon tea and putting your feet up. You’d be sleeping with your beloved sheik in a tent the whole time. I’d love to think I could because I’m romantically attached to the idea, but I know that I’d be screaming for a taxi after a while.

We mentioned coincidences earlier and while doing my research, I realised that I’d seen you in a production of Private Lives with Alan Rickman in 2001. Do you remember doing that? That was one of the most precious things, that production. I still feel emotional talking about it, partly because Alan was a friend as well as someone I worked with. It’s still quite raw that he’s not here any more. I literally spent years on stage with him, if you add up all the performances over the years. It was such a joy to discover a play I thought I knew and find as we worked on it that there were layers to it that I hadn’t got the first time around. As well as being witty and seductive, there were emotional layers between all of us during that collaboration with Howard David.

Photo: Joe Alblas

We managed to mine those layers and I had more and more admiration for Noel Coward.

Sheridan Morley said of Coward: “He understood better than anyone the elliptical twin-level technique . . . having a character say one thing but thinking and meaning something entirely different.”

[Laughs] Yes, of course! The possibility of doing that is something you want to find in the writing, and as an actor you want to be able to deliver that. And that’s what audiences love. Through Coward and his writing, the audience were absolutely with us, they had a really great time. You want to feel those lines of connection singing out and coming back to you all the time. I’ve had it before, and since, but you don’t get that all the time.

How did you cope with having to speak Arabic in Around the World in 80 Days? Well, obviously I couldn’t learn the whole language, not having several years at my disposal, but I had to learn something for the part before getting out there. It was difficult and I had to deliver some of it while sitting on a horse. So I had to learn it phonetically, and because it’s so unfamiliar it’s difficult to remember, with such a different soundscape. My next-door neighbour’s son Otto happened to be reading Arabic at Oxford. He had just come back from a trip to the Middle East at a point when I was struggling with my Arabic. He said that I was with Arabic where he had been when he first arrived at Oxford, ie nowhere!

Then they had to find an Arabic speaker who lived in Cape Town and he was on set, but he wasn’t really a teacher. He tried to teach me the Arabic alphabet but I didn’t have time. I just needed to learn the sounds.

So if you happened to be on holiday in an Arabic-speaking country, could you go into a restaurant and order something? Since a lot of it was about the attributes or the failings of a camel, probably not! Should I find myself haggling over the price of a camel, it might come in useful. n Around The World in 80 Days is on BBC1 this Christmas