It’s noisy here in the bar at the Old Vic; the air is teeming with thespy gossip and laughter and clinking glasses.
It’s noisy here in the bar at the Old Vic; the air is teeming with thespy gossip and laughter and clinking glasses. I’m sitting in a corner with the actress Rachael Stirling, who is drinking white wine and talking about her new play, An Ideal Husband. Luckily, Rachael has that actress’s knack for projecting her voice without shouting. I can hear her clearly above the din. She has a very fine voice, in fact, smooth and husky at the same time. She sounds like a public schoolgirl who has smoked too many cigarettes.
Rachael is excited after a long day of rehearsals. Taking a script from her handbag, she thumbs through it impatiently. ‘I think this must be Oscar Wilde’s fullest work,’ she says. ‘It’s just so bloody good — so rich and so human. It’s such a shame that our idea of Wilde is still so heavily associated with triviality: that’s just not who he is.’
An Ideal Husband is about politics and corruption, and Rachael finds the play relevant today. ‘It’s about the career trajectory of a young, ambitious, political man,’ she says. ‘You literally read it and go, “Oh, hello, David Cameron, hello, Nick Clegg, how’s it going?”’
She takes issue when I describe her part — she plays Lady Chiltern — as ‘an adoring, trusting woman’. ‘Lady Chiltern is much more than that, actually,’ she says, defensively. ‘She is wonderfully strident. She’s a high-minded puritan whose view of love is rather naive. She takes a journey through the course of the play and by the end of it she comes to understand the meaning of love.’
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