Lucy Eaton was one of the actors in possibly the most successful lockdown comedy of the pandemic, BBC1's Staged starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen, which was created and directed by her brother, Simon Evans, but this isn't all she was doing while the live arts scene was almost at a standstill.
She came on the BTG podcast in March 2021 to talk about her new podcast Hear Me Out, which features actors talking about themselves, but also about a favourite speech which they perform at the end. The series attracted some pretty big stars, opening with episodes featuring Claire Skinner, Adrian Lester, Denise Gough and Mark Bonnar.
Now she has released the beginning of a second series, again with some big names in the cast list, but this time it has been opened up to at least one non-actor and there are hints that non-theatre scripts may be considered in the future.
Joanna Vanderham played Lika in a Donmar Warehouse production Alexei Arbuzov's 1965 Russian play The Promise, in a new version by Penelope Skinner, in 2012 at Trafalgar Studios in London, and even after ten years she fell straight back into the emotion of the speech she chose to finish the episode. Before that, she spoke about what the play means to her, as well as about being picked out by a casting director while still at drama school for a TV role and then being persuaded that she should return to her studies by Alan Cumming.
The non-actor in this first batch of episodes is former National Theatre Artistic Director Richard Eyre, who has selected a piece from King Lear, which he performs with clarity and simplicity. He talks about the two occasions on which he directed the play, the first with Ian Holm at the National and the second on film with Anthony Hopkins; of the latter, he says he will never see a better performance in the role.
He talks about acting, saying that the job of an actor is not to be the person but to simulate what that person is like, but when Eaton mentions the oft-repeated anecdote about Laurence Olivier and Method actor Dustin Hoffman ("why don't you try acting?"), Eyre says he only half admires that as he doesn't judge actors—he said Judi Dench just becomes the character in the seconds it takes for the camera to start rolling, but not everyone can do that. Before he performs as Lear, Eyre recites a poem he has written about the first day of rehearsals
Sanjeev Bhaskar says that he wasn't brought up with any kind of theatre culture; it was TV and films for him. It was only when he saw East is East by Ayub Khan-Din at the Royal Court in 1996 that he didn't feel like he had to exclude his cultural heritage in order to relate to a piece of theatre. While he hasn't performed in the play (I saw his Goodness Gracious Me co-star Kulvinder Ghir in it in Bolton in 2018), he attended a writers' workshop at the Royal Court and Khan-Din was there with some sketchy scenes that eventually became this play, and they got talking.
Bhaskar's first choice of speech was the one Charlie Chaplin performs at the end of The Great Dictator, which Eaton rejected as not being theatre, but she says she may reconsider this policy for the future. We do get to hear a recording of a bit of the original from Chaplin himself, before Bhaskar performs as Abdul from East is East, talking about being ashamed of himself after a night in the pub in which everyone was making racist jokes and offensive remarks and he was laughing along with the rest of them. Bhaskar says he can relate to that experience.
There are plenty of podcasts featuring actors and other theatre people—including ours—but this is refreshingly different as nobody is on it to promote a current project and, while they do talk about their careers, it is all focussed around one play, an excerpt of which is performed at the end, plus Eaton has an impressive address book to show off. I was already subscribed to the podcast from the first series, and I look forward to hearing what is to come.