Polly Teale interview: Cuts are making the theatre ‘a place where you can only survive if you are from a privileged background’

I spend an hour with the theatre director Polly Teale. She’s 50ish with a tall, willowy physique and strong, aquiline features. Her hair is arranged in a combed bob whose flicky fringe overhangs her bright, deep-set eyes. She’s easy-going and so good-natured that at one point she asks me about myself — a courtesy few interviewees extend to journalists. But she’s focused, almost obsessively, on her current job and she steers all my questions back to her upcoming production of Bakersfield Mist, by the LA writer Stephen Sachs.

The story has elements of mystery, comedy and class war. It’s set in a trailer park in Bakersfield, a ruined backwater 60 miles from LA, whose name is shorthand in America for ‘the scrapheap’. The story features a jobless barmaid, Maude, who invites a top New York art critic, Lionel, to assess the provenance of a thrift-store painting that she believes is a Jackson Pollock masterpiece. Both characters are carrying baggage. Maude’s connection with the painting turns out to be more personal and significant than first appears. And Lionel has yet to recover from a professional crisis 30 years earlier when he convinced his backers to blow millions on a work that turned out to be fake.

‘Like Lionel,’ says Teale, ‘we make all sorts of assumptions about Maude very quickly. The play challenges all our prejudices about what is and isn’t of value. It’s very much about two characters from different worlds, completely different realities, and the collision of those worlds.’

Lionel is played by Ian McDiarmid. Kathleen Turner, returning to the West End after winning awards in 2006 for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stars as Maude. ‘It’s very exciting,’ says Teale, ‘to have a brand-new play in the West End, and at the centre of it is this woman who’s underclass, if you like, of a certain age, and possibly alcoholic.