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Distractions won’t go away. There’s a moth in my room and he’s large and noisy. I guide him out of the French windows with a broom, but he dodges back in. At 8 a.m. there are Eastern European builders wearing harnesses in my inner courtyard halfway up a scaffolding tower. I seriously consider recording their voices to help me with my accent, but since I don’t know what they are saying it’s quite possible they’re speaking Romanian, when what I need is Ukrainian. Their inflection goes up and mine needs to go down.
Eventually, I have a run-through of the whole play in front of Anne Marie, the voice coach. I find Rose’s story astonishingly moving. Even though I have no direct relatives who perished in the Holocaust, I must stand back and distance myself from the emotion because if I indulge it, no one will be moved but me. The run-through is good. Anne Marie beams.
I allow myself, guiltily, to have a dinner date in Aldwych in a nice, airy restaurant called Toklas, after Alice B., and am suddenly miserly about the price of a John Dory, even though I am not picking up the bill. My mother’s voice is in my head. ‘Maureen, you must be joking! For a fish? Have the haddock!’
I love the Elizabeth Line. Fourteen years in the making instead of the planned four means it lands as promised. Clean, half-full and only five minutes from Paddington to Tottenham Court Road. After rehearsal, Elizabeth zooms me to a haircut at Hari, which will cover the four weeks of Rose but still allow me to look like a 1940s martinet when I return to Corrie. The nice date arrives with herrings. A man after my own stomach.
Back in the park with my lines. Absolutely everyone there is talking to themselves with what look like white tampons stuck in their ears. There is a poster of me as Rose which looks 12 miles high, outside the Ambassadors Theatre. The herrings start to do front crawl in my belly. I’m pleasantly accosted by two fans from Canada. Corrie is huge there. I am comforted and touched by their open sincerity. If I screw up the play, I will have somewhere to slope off to.
I join friends and family at Mortlake Crematorium to send off the great actress and comedienne Maria Charles: the finest Jewish mother ever recorded on film. It was the funniest and best memorial I’ve ever attended. I spoke her lines from the 1976 TV play Bar Mitzvah Boy and, I hope, brought them back to life. So many faces were there, all of us looking a bit like pressed flowers.
First audience. It’s in G-d’s hands now. But in the words of Rose: ‘You’re owned by no one, except G-d, and G-d is only an idea. So, if you believe in G-d you have to believe in ideas: except now who believes in G-d any more, except the fanatically committed, and if that’s true, who believes in ideas?’ I realise I have written this out without writing fully the name of G-d. At 77 I’m still indoctrinated. It’s not a leg I need to break; it’s a habit.
Maureen Lipman stars in Rose at the Ambassadors Theatre until 18 June.
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