Crisis? It's only a little spot of bother

Published on Monday 2 August 2004 02:07

WHEN NICA Burns, the producer of the embattled Edinburgh Fringe show One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, met her cast of beleaguered actors late Friday afternoon, they had their backs to her. When they turned round to face her, all of them had scarlet spots covering their faces.

"I was so happy!" exclaims Burns, who can’t stop giggling at the recollection. "After everything that’s happened, they were still fooling around."

The 14-strong company’s jokey behaviour was their response to the latest crisis to hit the hot-ticket drama - the star of the show, Hollywood movie actor Christian Slater, has gone down with chicken pox, a week after the director, Guy Masterson, quit.

"You couldn’t make all this up," sighs Frances Barber, the glamorous actress playing the sinister Nurse Ratched whose name is now synonymous with vampish femmes fatales. Barber - whose luscious lips are always heavily lipsticked - provided some of the vivid red make-up for that fake pox. "I think all that daftness with Nica was a sign of how well things are going," she says, speaking from a friend’s London home, where she’s having her first evening off since Masterson walked out.

The company has been working 24/7 with the new director, Terry Johnson. "It was like something out of Lord of the Rings," enthuses Barber, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, and one of the stars of popular TV dramas, such as Real Women and Manchild.

"Terry’s done an amazing rescue job. He’s come in as our Gandalf and really knocked the show into shape," she adds.

"He’s lifted the company to another level. But, yes, here we are, plunged into yet another crisis, with Christian falling ill. It’s frustrating for all of us, but especially for him, because he’s so excited about Edinburgh."

Barber visited her co-star in his sick-bed at his London hotel on Saturday afternoon. "The poor boy’s covered in spots, really poorly. I had it as a child - thank goodness - so I’m immune. However, I do think we’re into penalty shoot-outs with this game and, since Christian doesn’t play for England, we may still have a chance of winning.

"I’m doing everything I can to stand by him. His performance as McMurphy - the role made famous by Jack Nicholson in the film - is going to be electric. Brandoesque! And we’re definitely not fighting," she insists.

"I know that Guy’s suggested otherwise, speaking of coping with the clash between our two ‘enormous egos’ in the rehearsal room, but it’s simply not true. We get on so well. From day one, Christian and I clicked big time," she says, reiterating everything she told me when I met her in London two days before Masterson walked.

"Hand on heart, I know Christian would say the same thing about me. In fact, we get on so well it may have threatened a third party; let’s just put it like that."

During her lunch break - coffee and a cigarette - she told me she met her co-star several days before they began rehearsals. "He walked into the room wearing dark glasses and I thought, ‘Oh yeah, Hollywood! Here we go!’ But I promise you he’s a great guy - and is he handsome! He was born to play McMurphy - I can think of no other Hollywood star who could do it. Christian’s 35, just the right age, and he’s had a wild past, a bit of history. There’s even a moment where I have to read out everything McMurphy’s done and you totally believe this boy is capable of all that."

Now in her mid-forties, Barber - the daughter of a bookie and a school cleaner - is much too young to be Slater’s parent. Her face is a perfect heart, the hair is "bedhead" brunette, the lips are carmine and the husky voice is nicotine-scarred.

In rehearsal gear of a well-cut jacket, tight T-shirt and spray-on jeans, worn with a swag of silver jewellery and killer-heeled boots with toes as sharp and pointed as her intelligence, she looks every inch the gorgeous actress.

Fearless when it comes to using her potent sexual power on stage and film, she was Rosie, the politically correct social worker getting laid with total indifference in the controversial, anti-Thatcher film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid in 1985. The director, Stephen Frears, told her he cast her because she was "the least ‘prudey’ person" he had ever met. The avant-garde A Zed and Two Noughts, Peter Greenaway’s zoological zinger, saw her playing a prostitute with a predeliction for zebras.

She’s also starred at Cannes in a whole slew of French language films. Meanwhile, her acclaimed, award-winning stage roles range from Camille to Ophelia, from Lady Macbeth to the Sixties-survivor in Closer to Heaven, the 2001 Pet Shop Boys musical.

When I put it to Barber that in all of these roles she has deliciously celebrated femininity, she laughs raucously: "You mean I wear revealing clothes and tight tops, with loads of make-up?"

But then she says seriously: "You know what - all joking aside - I do use my femaleness. And I do it on purpose. I could come to rehearsals in a track-suit, but I dress like this," she says, gesturing at her magnificent bosom, "because it makes me feel powerful, especially when I have make-up on too."

Before he left the show, Masterson asked her to come to rehearsals without her face on. To which her silken response was: "Umm, well, you’d have to sleep with me then and even then you probably wouldn’t see me without the lippy and the mascara. I’m like Dolly Parton - you’ve no idea how expensive it is to look this cheap!

"It’s not just me dressing up, though, I feel I’m like Boudicca in my warpaint and woad."

It’s about power, she says firmly, tucking a stray strand of long hair behind her ear.

"All this is armour. Of course the truly secure don’t need that. Despite years of psychotherapy - I had a lot of problems in the past with bulimia and so on - my insecurities are such that I need my heels, I need whatever outfit I look good in, and I need my lipstick. Then I feel I can face the world."

Today, Barber lives alone in a loft in Clerkenwell, London, with her bulldog, Smack. There’s a man on the scene, but they don’t live together and she won’t name him. Since she said a couple of years ago that she would never have another relationship with an actor, I take it he’s not a thespian? She falls about laughing, then says saucily: "Did I say that? Well, it just goes to show never say never ... And will I never learn to keep my big mouth shut?"

She lived with the actor Neil Pearson for a long time, and then had an affair with another actor, David Threlfall. She once found a boyfriend in bed with her best friend. "But I have to be careful what I say about men in general," she says warily. "Every time I say anything remotely derogatory about men, Neil rings me up because he says people will think I’m talking about him - and I’m not!"

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is set in an insane asylum and the great set-piece of the play is the duel - "a combative battle" - between the monstrous Nurse Ratched and the rebellious inmate McMurphy, which has Barber champing at the bit. "I can’t wait," she says, licking her red lips.

Even if fowl pest were to strike this apparently jinxed show, I confidently predict that Barber won’t be donning the Marigolds, only Nurse Ratched’s starchy whites. "Wait to see what happens when Christian tears off my uniform," she says, with a sphinx-like smile.

• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh, 6 to 30 August, transferring to the Gielgud Theatre, London, in September.