Lindsay Duncan on Her Broadway Love Affair and London Star Turn in Hay Fever

Lindsay Duncan, winner of both a Tony and an Olivier Award for her scintillating performance as Amanda in Noel Coward’s Private Lives, is back on the West End a decade later leading a revival of Hay Fever, Coward’s 1925 comedy of bad manners about a weekend house party gone spectacularly awry. (Howard Davies’ production is playing, aptly enough, at the Noel Coward Theatre through June 2.) A regular presence on the New York stage, the delightful Duncan chatted with Broadway.com one recent afternoon about acting the master, missing New York and what it's like to have played Margaret Thatcher on British TV at a time when Meryl Streep is winning accolades for bringing Britain's former prime minister to the screen.

You’re an actress playing an actress in Hay Fever, though your character, Judith Bliss, is an especially preening representative of your profession!
Isn’t she just [laughs]! Judith makes me laugh, I have to say, though there’s quite a gap between the kind of actress [Coward] wrote in the 1920s and where we are today. She seems to me an extreme version of the comments that are always made about us, insofar as there are lots of performers with a finely honed wit. Her playfulness is very familiar, even if the extremes Judith goes to and the games she plays are not. I know lots of wildly funny people in the business, but I don’t know anybody who goes as far as she does.

Judith gives the impression always of being “on,” of living her life as a performance off stage as well as on.
Well, she clearly craves attention, and I can honestly say that I don’t, so that’s a departure for me. I’m perfectly gregarious, but I can also be really happy left to my own devices with nobody watching me or listening to me.

Is it true that you had never seen the play?
No, I never had, which is funny, isn’t it? I had a friend in the Judi Dench production [on the West End in 2006] and would have gone to see it had I been able to. It’s not quite the same as if I as a theater practitioner had never seen Hamlet; that would be quite weird [laughs]. I come to this clean, and that’s a good way to work.

Judith is often described as a “monster,” though presumably you wouldn’t call her that.
I suppose if you’re on the receiving end of her then, yes, it must feel merciless. But I don’t think she’s a monster.

Did this revival come about as a result of your longtime tie to director Howard Davies?
I can’t really imagine a future that doesn’t have a Howard Davies in it every few years! We’ve done serious stuff together [Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof] and light stuff [Private Lives], so when this offer came, I thought, “Definitely.” And I had read the play. Occasionally I sort of do my homework and think, “Oh Christ, I’ve got to read some plays that I should know,” so I knew that it was pure comedy but also quite difficult because almost nothing happens. That means you have got to be at the top of your game.

Hay Fever is quite different from Private Lives, which seems to inhabit much darker terrain.
This feels very different. There isn’t the same degree of pain because Hay Fever isn’t about a love affair; the love affair in this play is more with the whole family, and I suppose to some extent Judith has quite a love affair with herself and her career [laughs]. But at the same time, I’m reminded of Private Lives because we’re in the same theater and I’m actually in the dressing room that Alan [Rickman] had then. And, of course, there are lots of sense memories because it’s Noel Coward.

Speaking of Alan, he’s finishing up a successful Broadway engagement in Seminar as your husband [actor Hilton McRae] is returning from his off-Broadway run in The Kreutzer Sonata.
Yes, I’ve been thinking about “over the pond” an awful lot recently! Private Lives was such an extraordinary experience from everybody’s point of view. Alan has been much on my mind, and the fact that I wasn’t able to see him in Seminar was really frustrating. At least Hilton got to go while he was there.

New York has been a regular part of your performing life, from Ibsen, Pinter, and Caryl Churchill off-Broadway to Shakespeare, Coward, and Christopher Hampton on Broadway.
I’ve always had not just an affection but a real love for the theater family in New York, and I really feel it is a family. I’m so touched by the generosity of everyone there. [The city] has a great sense of community and the audiences are so appreciative.

Would you like to take Hay Fever to Broadway?
Who knows? I always hope to take something back to New York if it’s good enough to earn the right to be there, and I mean that: The piece has to earn its place. I always have an open mind about taking a production on somewhere else.

Shifting to your screen work, what was your response to Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher on screen not that long after you played her [in the 2009 BBC telefilm, Margaret]?
I have the highest regard for Meryl Streep as an actress and think she’s a fabulous person, as well. I don’t have a flicker of doubt in my mind that she’s brilliant, but I haven’t seen the film yet partly because it came out while we were rehearsing and also it felt a bit like going back. I will absolutely see it, but when I feel a bit of distance myself.

This is your first West End appearance in five years. It seems as if you are getting choosier about stage roles.
That has to do with the knowledge you gain over the years of what doing a run of a play is going to take and also because I like my [offstage] life very much; I really do. So I always think it might be a while before I do another play. But, that said, I haven’t got a rule book. Something could come up—a new play could arrive—and I would just go, “That’s it!”