Laughter lines that hide a secret

Published on Sunday 12 March 2006 02:03

THIS is what it's like when you go for a drink with Una McLean and Lynn Ferguson. As soon as the barman says hello, McLean catches his accent and asks if he's Irish. No, he tells her, he's from eastern Europe.

The mistake amuses McLean enough to let loose one of her trademark laughs - a sound so distinctive that even her old colleague Stanley Baxter never managed to imitate it. The barman, not fully understanding why she is laughing or, indeed, who she is, looks slightly taken aback. McLean tries to reassure him it's a lovely accent, but he only looks more puzzled.

Then, from the other side of the bar, two genuinely Irish people chirp up, claiming the barman's accent sounds nothing like their own. Ferguson is soon pumping them for their life stories and we have yet to order our first bottle of wine.

By the time of our third bottle - which comes with glasses of water because they clearly think we need to slow down - complete strangers are approaching to ask for Ferguson's autograph before nipping home to catch her playing Stella in the acerbic hospital drama No Angels. What was intended to be a quiet, post-rehearsal interview is getting perilously close to a full-on party.

You can only imagine what rehearsals are like. The women admit everything takes twice as long because of their uproarious laughter. McLean hoots again as she tells the story of how she had come over all grande dame and lectured her younger colleagues about the importance of punctuality. The very next day, she got the rehearsal time wrong and sat obliviously in the caf over the road for half an hour while the rest of the cast tried to attract her attention from the rehearsal room window.

The reason for our meeting in this previously quiet Leith bar is that McLean and Ferguson have been cast in the new Douglas Maxwell play, Melody, a dark comedy about family secrets. Ferguson is in the title role as a woman trying to keep a lid on the past, while McLean plays her proxy mother-in-law with skeletons in a cupboard of her own.

"It's like a thriller in that it takes you on a journey and you think you know where it's going, then suddenly - boom! - you've changed tack," says McLean. "The audience will find it fascinating."

In terms of age, it's perfect casting: Ferguson was at drama college with McLean's son Gavin - whose work on tour with the Darkness and the Red Hot Chili Peppers makes McLean uncommonly tuned-in for a woman in her 70s - so playing mother and daughter-in-law is quite feasible. But more than that, the women have hit it off on a much deeper level.

"You and I are strangely very similar," says Ferguson.

"Yes, and that's why we get on so well," says McLean. "We spark off each other."

"The first thing we did was go for a wee lunch," says Ferguson, recalling the time they discovered how much they had in common. "We sorted stuff in that first lunchtime. We made a wee pact - which you cannae know about - but it's a sign that means, 'I know your number.'"

Perhaps what the two of them recognise in each other is intelligence, 'mouthiness' and a genuine sense of compassion behind the good-time persona. It's revealing that both have a facility to play everything from broad comedy to high tragedy, as if the discipline of one informs the technique of the other, creating democratic, unpretentious performances that can nonetheless scale the heights.

Take McLean. She is known to a generation as the star of Scotland's first ever one-woman TV show - Did You See Una? in 1967 - as a leading light of the Five Past Eight shows and as a wisecracking panto turn. Yet as a stage actor - in plays by the likes of Chris Hannan, Linda McLean and Michel Tremblay - she's equally capable of breaking your heart.

Likewise, Ferguson - sister of Stateside favourite Craig Ferguson - has been a formidable stand-up comic with a larger-than-life stage presence ever since her post-student days as one half of the Alexander Sisters. Yet her performance in her own 2004 play, Biographies in a Bag, about her experience of post-natal depression, was a thing of exquisite tenderness. Those who saw her in the award-winning Fringe shows Heart and Sole in 1995 and Kindling in 2000 will agree.

Ferguson is unsentimental about this. As far as she's concerned, she's in the entertainment business, and whether she's dealing in joy or tragedy, writing Millport for Radio 4 or doing the voice of Mac in Chicken Run, it's all the same job. "High art or low art makes no difference," she says. "It's a service industry and the service is: you come in here and I entertain you."

McLean, though, sees the value in one style of work influencing the other. "There are a lot of people in the Scottish theatre who started off as actors and then went into variety - Duncan MacRae, Stanley Baxter, Walter Carr - and I think it makes you a much rounder performer. It's good to have all these facets."

Actors such as McLean and Ferguson bring an extra tension to straight roles because you know they could let rip with a slap of the thigh and a witty remark at any moment. "The kind of actors I like are those where there is danger," agrees McLean. "You can never be absolutely sure about them, they could just suddenly do something."

Ever since her gift for comedy was discovered during a Christmas revue at the Citizens Theatre and she was signed up for the Five Past Eight show, she has been at a loss to explain why some forms of acting are considered better than others.

"The Five Past Eight show was so glamorous, like Las Vegas come to Glasgow," she says. "Jack Radcliffe was a wonderful warm-up man, a brilliant comic, and he was so impressed because I had come from the Citizens. I was 'legitimate' - that was the term they used. Yet I admired these people so much and thought there was no way I could do what they did."

Despite her command of a crowd, however, McLean can't bear the thought of doing stand-up herself. "Johnnie Beattie always used to say I was the funniest of the lot," she says.

"He said I was very good at describing things, and it's true. But I remember doing a show with Falkirk Youth Theatre and the manager took me aside and said he wanted me to do 20 minutes on my own. My throat closed up. I was terrified. I did it and it was fantastic, but I reached a time when I thought, no, I like a pal on stage. People say I could have done it, but I prefer being somebody else."

"I bet you'd have been a magnificent compre if it was now," says Ferguson. "The systems when you were 20 and when I was 20 were really different. You can entertain a whole room just by having a wee chat: 'Here's a loaf ... Marks & Spencer ... I said to Gavin ... la, la, la.' You'd be amazing at it because you're really good with people."

"I've done it for charity," offers McLean, reluctantly.

"So is it the money thing?" quips Ferguson and you suddenly get a vision of what a great double act these two would make, each trying to out-gag the other.

"The difference between us," says Ferguson, "is that one of us has got an MBE and the other one hasn't."

And McLean, newly honoured by the Queen, lets out another hyena laugh, a raucous guffaw that leaps an octave and comes to a sudden halt. "Am I shown any respect? Am I not!"

• Melody, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Tuesday until April 1; Tron Theatre, Glasgow, April 4-15