‘We rot. Don’t we?’

Joanna Lumley and Sister Elizabeth Obbard are seated at the front of the church. Lumley is perched elegantly on the edge of her chair; Sister Elizabeth settles deep into hers, submerged under folds of habit. They are talking in front of an audience at the Carmelite church in Kensington, west London, about life as a nun. And Sister Elizabeth is being wonderfully honest. ‘The first six months were dreadful,’ she says. This was in the 1960s, when religious sisters did hard, physical work that was ‘supposed to make you humble’. Did it make her humble, asks Lumley. ‘No,’ says Sister Elizabeth, who is meek but steely. ‘It made me angry.’

The evening has been organised by Grange Park Opera, in advance of its production of Les Carmélites, a spine-chilling opera about the French Revolution that culminates in the execution of 16 nuns. The connection to Lumley is that her husband, Stephen Barlow, is conducting.