Alison Steadman interview
"This is one of those projects where I read about six pages of the first script and rang my agent immediately and said 'yes'," enthuses Alison Steadman, one of Britain's best-loved actresses.
"I love doing radio but I also love doing characters that are very different from myself and it's sometimes difficult to get those roles in television. So with my voice I can be Virginia Woolf, or Ginny Fox as she's known here, and also have the contrast of doing housekeeper Mrs Gosling as well, so it's perfect for me."
Playing two very different characters in the series, Alison had to decide which voices to use for both. For this she researched the internet listening to historical voice recordings. She explains: "I looked at many, many pictures of the real Virginia Woolf's life and I found one recording of her on the web. It's seven minutes long and it's the only recording that exists which is pretty extraordinary and quite sad really. She's giving a lecture on the English language and I listened to it over and over again - while having my lunch and my breakfast - I'd just keep listening to it. And I also listened to real voice recordings of some of the other characters she was connected with like Vita Sackville-West, which amazingly you can get now on the internet."
"I can't impersonate Virginia Woolf exactly because she is giving a lecture and I'm playing emotional scenes but the way they spoke was quite extraordinary so I've taken the essence of her, of the pronunciation of certain words and they way they 'rrrroll their rrrs', and used that to play Ginny. For Mrs Gosling I got a little précis of the character and it said she was from the Maidstone area so I found a recording on the internet of an elderly lady from Maidstone and listened to her accent. And because Mrs Gosling is trying to be a bit posh because she is 'working with the knobs', I tried to capture an essence of that too. It's been great fun for me!"
A hugely successful face on both big and small screen, what attracts Alison to radio? "No lines to learn," she laughs. "I'm sick of learning lines! But seriously radio is a great medium. I love listening to the radio, always have done. The world is your oyster - you can be on the moon, you can be in Australia, you can be down a mine, you can do anything you want. There are no limits to what you can do because there are no props, there are no sets. Also physically the way one's looks dictate what you can do in film and television or on stage even. Of course there is some scope for changing your look but in radio you can be absolutely anything you want."
Alison was relatively new to the exploits of the Bloomsbury Group. She says: "I knew as much as anyone knows really. I knew the basic things about Virginia Woolf. I read The Waves in the seventies and I didn't understand a word of it but I remember thinking it was absolutely wonderful, the rhythm of it. She was an extraordinary character."
"The Bloomsbury Group were so brilliant and clever but so extreme in their real lives. The men all wanted to be women and the women wanted to be men - but they all clung to their partners and it was a very complicated world they were in, nothing was black and white. And it would be terribly easy to be cruel about these people, to send them up cruelly, but Sue Limb has a tremendous warmth and has captured them in the most brilliantly warm and witty way!"