The Coronation Street writers have produced 26 scenes to ease me out of the show for long enough for me to nip down to London to do a play for four weeks in the West End. They are long scenes – one is 13 pages – with my screwed-up, long-lost daughter, played by Claire Sweeney. I really need to get a grip on my Corrie lines, but my attention is torn between them and the play script. It’s been eight months since I last performed Rose, a one-woman show about a feisty old lady who goes from a shtetl in Ukraine to owning a hotel in Miami Beach, and this week it opens at the Ambassadors Theatre. I start on page one of the 47-page play, only to get distracted by a new Corrie script. Consequently, from about page 22, I know very little. This is the cause of major fright and much gnashing of teeth and could lead to a short evening in the theatre and a puzzled audience in the bar.
Back in London, I seem to have an actual date. With a man. I ask him: ‘How long since you last went on a date?’ ‘Fifty-two years,’ he replies. We are tentative. It was my late partner Guido’s birthday so in his honour we ate bottarga with lemon, olive oil and garlic and a glass of Malbec. I’d like to think he would wish me a second date. But what a crazed time to begin a relationship. I am giddy and grim and horribly distracted. The date walks me through Kensington Park and corrects my lines when I flounder. This guy could be a contender.
Distractions won’t go away. There’s a moth in my room and he’s large and noisy.
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