“I've spent half the time running round in my underwear,” laughs Kate
Quinnell as she swishes into the bar of Pitlochry Festival Theatre. “So
it's like Noises Off all over again, basically.”
Quinnell is talking about her role as Jessica in Alan Ayckbourn's
Communicating Doors, one of three plays she appears in during this
year's PFT season. This marks the sparkly-eyed Welsh actor's return to
the theatre after causing something of a stir during her last two
stints here. As opening gambits go, Quinnell's remarks on her costume –
or lack of it – for her latest appearance is refreshingly if somewhat
disarmingly candid, albeit utterly without guile. It wasn't just
running round in her underwear as ditzy wannabe starlet Brooke in
Michael Frayn's ingenious back and front stage farce that caused such a
commotion.
Rather, it was Ms Quinnell's lively mix of a magnetic stage presence,
instinctive comic timing and multi-tasking versatility in roles such as
Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, Lois Lane in Kiss Me Kate and Mabel
Chiltern in An Ideal Husband that have captivated Pitlochry audiences.
Such a stir did Quinnell cause across her previous two seasons that she
scooped the Leon Sinden Award, voted for by the audience, not once, but
twice. In a two strikes and out approach that will allow her onstage
colleagues a crack of the whip, Quinnell has been excluded from this
season's voting.
“I think that's only fair,” she says. “I just hope that I can vote for
other actors in the company.”
This season, as well as Jessica in Communicating Doors, Quinnell plays
Mabel Chiltern in J.M. Barrie's Dear Brutus, and, in her third
season-opening musical on the trot, appears as brutalised flower-shop
assistant Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors.
“It's quite surreal being eaten by a man-eating plant,” Quinnell
laughs, “but I get to play my clarinet and my sax, and it's a genre of
music that I absolutely love, early rock and roll, Motown, doo-wop, you
can't help but tap along. That's one of the great things about the
musicals here. Because we're all playing instruments with each other
onstage as well as acting, we're all relying on each other, and that
gives things a real ensemble feel. Also, I get to do the four things
that I love doing most in life – singing, acting, playing my
instruments and dancing – so I'm happy.”
This isn't necessarily the case with the women Quinnell is playing in
Pitlochry. All of them, at least at the start of each play, are far
from happy. Quinnell describes down-at-heel Audrey in Little Shop of
Horrors as “The tart with a heart. Bless, she's stuck in a rut in Skid
Row with the same job and an abusive relationship that she's too scared
to get out of. It's quite sad, really. Beneath all the bright lights
and colours it's really quite dark.”
In the time-travel based Communicating Doors, Quinnell plays Jessica, a
woman who is warned by as visitor from the future that the man she's
just married will later murder her, while in Dear Brutus, Quinnell
plays a woman whose husband is cheating on her, but who has the tables
turned on her when they go for a walk in the woods.
While such a variety of roles will no doubt keep Quinnell on her toes,
it is musical theatre that is both her natural habitat and her first
love.
“I'd like to think I'm an all-rounder,” she says, “because I loved
doing Noises Off and An Ideal Husband as much as doing Kiss Me Kate,
but to be honest it is what I love doing. There's something about
having a sing and a dance that just fills me with joy, really. I
genuinely love it. I've only been playing the saxophone for six months,
so it's making it's professional debut in Little Shop. What better way
is there of doing that than in a show with lots of solos? It's a dream.
I love playing it. I feel like Lisa Simpson. It's so cool.”
Quinnell was doing pantomime when she was supposed to have her first
audition for Pitlochry, and was only offered the season after a recall.
“Up until my first season here I'd never been to Scotland, and now I
find I've spent three years of my life here and can't keep away from
the place. It's a long way from home, but I can honestly say that first
year was the best year of my life.”
Aside from her work onstage, Quinnell met her actor boyfriend that
first season. She's also taken advantage of the scenery.
“Just look at the view,” she says, motioning towards the bar's windowed
facade. “It's not often you get to sit in your dressing room, look out
the window and watch salmon jumping. I'm very very lucky.”
Born and raised in Cardiff, Quinnell started performing from an early
age with her two sisters and one brother, all born a year apart. Ever
since she can remember, the Quinnells have been making music. They each
learnt to play several instruments apiece, and used to sing in
four-part harmony purely for fun, visiting friends houses and forming
ad hoc bands wherever and whenever they could.
While this may have been a puzzle for her dad, who'd never seven seen a
musical until he met his wife, it was the matriarchal influence from
Quinnell's song and dance loving English teacher mum that fed into her
brood.
At school, in-between helping her mum with her own shows, Quinnell
played lead roles in Grease and South Pacific, and started to wonder if
she could turn her love of performing into a career. Undecided between
acting and music, she opted to study both at Aberystwyth University.
Here she played a very young Lady Macbeth, which led directly to her
professional debut, again as Eliza in My Fair Lady.
While she and one of her sisters who's now head of music in a school in
Monmouth are blessed with perfect pitch, Quinnell is the only member of
the clan who's taken things further. While her doctor brother plays in
a band for fun, Quinnell's third sister has forsaken music entirely in
favour of the fashion industry.
Inbetween her first stab at Eliza and Pitlochry, Quinnell understudied
the lead in a tour of The Thorn Birds, played “a tarty air stewardess”
in Come Fly With Me, a big band musical at Cardiff's Millenium Centre,
and has played Snow White in panto. For the future, beyond Pitlochry
and a stint as Cinderella, Quinnell has her sights set on other
stalwarts of the musical stage.
“I’d love to play Sally Bowles in Cabaret,” she gushes. “Any part in
Chicago, Roxie or Velma, I don't mind. Oh, and Adelaide in Guys and
Dolls. I love that part. She's such a character."
Whether she ends up doing these in Pitlochry or the west end, Quinnell
retains a sense of wonder at how things have worked out. Especially as
sometimes she even gets to keep her clothes on.
“Even now I'll get a pay slip through, and I think, oh, God, I'm being
paid to do something I love. That doesn't happen to a lot of people, so
I feel like the luckiest person alive.”
Little Shop of Horrors, The 39 Steps and Rope will run in rep at
Pitlochry Festival Theatre until October
www.pitlochry.org.uk
The Herald, June 12th 2012
ends
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