Fright night

Here comes Jane Asher. She swings through the doors of a small Chelsea hotel, chucks her bag on the floor, and sits down with an expectant look. Her voluminous red hair has attractive hints of something blonder on top. Her eyes are pale blue, and extraordinarily intense, and she has a fulsome rack of plump white teeth that hint at large appetites. But her figure is as trim as a teenager’s.

We meet a few weeks before she begins rehearsing Charley’s Aunt, the classic Victorian farce in which she plays a Brazilian dowager, Donna Lucia d’Alvadorez.

Does she think it’ll be more fun because the script is a bundle of laughs?

‘No, there are always those technical things that are just as tricky to do. And if it’s not funny, it’d be a disaster. Whether it’s comedy or tragedy, the fear is the same.’ She seems fascinated by the subject of backstage nerves. ‘First nights are terrifying,’ she says. ‘Agony. Awful, and the fear never really gets any better. The first preview has a sort of terror of its own. It’s very, very scary because there are people watching for the first time. And then press night inevitably is bad as well. You shouldn’t mind, but you can’t help it.’

All actors claim not to read reviews but Asher is the first I’ve believed. ‘I genuinely don’t read them,’ she says, ‘for two or three years.’ Her priority is to protect her performance from external influences. ‘If a critic says, “She delivers this line and it’s just fantastic,” then you come to that line and you think, “Huhhhhh, this is where I’m just fantastic.” But I don’t know how I did it. What did I do? And anyway, one critic can think that something’s great and another thinks it’s crap, so you know…’