It would be fun to go for tequila with Katherine Parkinson. Also, it would be inappropriate at this point. The star of BBC One’s family sitcom Here We Go and Channel 4’s The IT Crowd is wry, crass and resolutely refuses to take himself too seriously, but it’s Monday lunchtime and we’re here to talk Shakespeare. She’s never done it before — “but can we say I did?” she suggests, “‘In the Regions’?” — but she’s going straight to divine level playing the smart, strong and secretly sad Beatrice in ” Much Ado About Nothing’ at the National Theatre.
This is expert airstrike-worthy casting. Parkinson’s quick wit sometimes masks the fact that she is a very good actress. In 2019, she earned an Olivier nomination for her performance in Laura Wade’s Home, I’m Darling, as a woman who rejects modern feminism and turns her life into a Kat Kidston fever dream. Just before the pandemic, she gave a startlingly offbeat performance as a traveler whose life unravels when she loses her shoe in EV Crowe’s Shoe Lady. But she’s also obviously a lot of fun—both as an actor and as herself on shows like Taskmaster. Beatrice brings it all together: it’s a fun, dramatic role and has lots of big speeches. She is one of Shakespeare’s best heroines.
A conversation with Parkinson’s is full of this light and shadow. She may joke about Britain – asked who should be the next prime minister, she replies “Nadine Dorries … I really hope she runs” – but there are things that really matter to her. She talks about them passionately, without frivolity – and then she catches herself. Like when, seriously and thoughtfully, Parkinson says to me, “I’ve always wanted to play Beatrice and—this is going to sound really stupid—but part of me feels… like… I’m… Beatrice.” She pauses and bursts into giggles. “Oh my God. I can’t believe I just said that.”
It’s a character that resonates because “she’s someone who uses wit as a defense. I mean, not always defensively, but sometimes as a way to compensate for some long-held sense of injustice, a sense of inadequacy,” she adds in a hasty, self-deprecating voice, “which maybe I do.” In the past, she has rejected the idea that comedy comes from a defensive place, “because I find it offensive, the suggestion that you’re only funny if you’re damaged and vulnerable. But I think in the play it’s a kind of shield [for Beatrice]. But she is also very joyful – they say, “she wakes up laughing on her own”.
To borrow Parkinson’s summary of Much Ado, “I feel a bit like a couple who had a row and then screwed each other in the end.” Beatrice and Benedick are engaged in a war of words, ignoring the fact that they like each other because, as mentioned, he has caused her some past pain. The NT production is directed by Simon Godwin, who was behind the Jesse Buckley/Josh O’Connor Romeo and Juliet during the lockdown and who made the riotous, gender-reversed Twelfth Night with Tamzin Grigg. His Much Ado is set in 1930s Sicily, with a live band, a “Wes Anderson vibe” to the set and “some pretty extreme costumes” for Parkinson. Her Beatrice is an actress, returning to a hotel run by her aunt and uncle. Parkinson has a whole backstory on the couple – “I should probably mention it to John [Heffernan, playing Benedick],” she says, as an aside—in which Beatrice gave up a brilliant film job to spend time with Benedick, only for him to disappear for a lowly writing gig.
Cuts have been made to the script to bring it into the 21st century – the line where Beatrice describes herself as “sunburnt” is gone. “Sunburn used to mean ugliness, and that’s not good,” says Parkinson. The question of whether it is right to continue to stage certain Shakespeare plays is a fraught one; earlier this year, Juliet Stevenson suggested that The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice should “just be buried”.
Parkinson continues his fine performance on stage in Much Ado About Nothing at the National Theatre
(Manuel Harlan)
“I agree, there are problems,” says Parkinson. “I know you can say that any great art is great art. But if you know the context, you may find yourself wanting to choose some other great art. Not the great art that has problems around it. It’s a shame, she notes, that Merchant’s ouster takes Portia, one of Shakespeare’s best female roles, out of the rotation.
Parkinson may be inclined to bury some of her past roles as well. “Mm-hmm,” she says, her mouth pursed, not naming them. “I’m definitely not a particularly hypocritical person, but I just think that… TV is already pretty complicated. And you have to think about your message and your story.” After all, television can be formative. Parkinson remembers watching Only Fools and Horses with her family growing up — “you almost learn your humor by watching what your parents laugh at.” Her two daughters are now old enough to watch certain shows with their parents; they loved her own show, Here We Go. The sitcom about a family dealing with everyday chaos was one of the best comedies of the year – but it was something of a sleeper hit. Maybe, wonders Parkinson, because “it wasn’t packaged as radical or edgy” — but she doesn’t think the humor in it is “tame.” “I don’t like tame humor. Why bother?”
She remains best known for her role as Jen in The IT Crowd, for which she won a Bafta in 2014. Almost a decade after it ended, it still enjoys cult status. “The surprise for me with this show is that in prison a lot of ‘young people’ watched it. And the ‘young people’ come up to me and still recognize me from it … which is good.” Some of the show now looks ‘quite dated’, Parkinson reckons. In 2020, an episode of the third series was axed after it was condemned as transphobic. “And I think it’s right.” (In the episode, Matt Berry’s character becomes enraged after discovering that the woman he’s been dating is transgender, and the two get into a physical fight.)
The idea of leading with your desire was out of the question. It meant you were scum, let’s face it.
Looking back, it seems a shame that an actress as good and funny as Parkinson made a name for herself as sidekick to two dudes – Richard Ayoade’s Maurice and Chris O’Dowd’s Rae. “I think all I would say about it is that I was very good friends with Chris before we started. And how wonderful that there was a role written by someone who was also his age and also Irish. It was specially made for Chris and I always felt… going to rehearsals in my weird vintage outfits with all my curly hair and Graham [Linehan, writer] it would be like, “Okay, I want her to look like Ally McBeal.” And suddenly I would have my hair done and be wearing a pencil skirt. Not in a way that was conscious on Graham’s part or anyone’s part, but he was objectifying me because he’s not a woman. And eventually, over time, I got over it, he kind of picked up on my personal quirks.”
It’s not the writer’s fault, she adds—people write subjectively from their own experiences. The solution: more writers with diverse perspectives. Wade’s script for Home, I’m Darling comes along, for example, and “the gauntlet goes off.” But when Parkinson began her career, there wasn’t the same energy behind female-led stories that allowed Fleabag, I Hate Suzie and I May Destroy You to grace our screens. Did she ever feel a little irritated by it? “Yes!” she says with a slight pain. “I think you’re defined by your generation, a lot more than you think.” This year’s Good Luck to You Leo Grande, starring Emma Thompson as a widow in search of her own pleasure and written by a “great friend” and creative associate Katie Brand, “resonates so much.”
“Growing up, it was all about consent. You would agree if someone was a good person. The idea of leading with your desire was out of the question. It meant you were scum, let’s face it. And I know that not everyone in my generation grew up with that feeling. But that’s pretty much how I grew up.”Parkinson was born in the suburb of Isleworth and went to Oxford in the 1990s to study classics; she was at St Hilda’s College for Women (started admitting men for the first time in 2008). At her initial interview, a tutor told her that given the choice between two good candidates, he would choose the beautiful one. (“Being only 17 years old, I was trying to figure out what category he thought I was in,” she previously said.)
From left: Richard Ayoade, Catherine Parkinson and Chris O’Dowd in cult classic ‘The IT Crowd’
(Channel 4)
That same sense of not asking for too much carried over into her creative image. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’m just not a writer. Write!? I’m an actress!’ Now I realize that I wrote as a child. I was writing with Katie. The two had a Radio Four pilot who was not reassigned. “Now, 20 years later, we have a series [podcast Women Like Us]. It’s pretty much the same thing. And sometimes I look back and think that our creative instincts were slightly cut off in a way that it wouldn’t have been.” Now writers like Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Michaela Coel are “leading from the front. And I really think there’s a story to be told about women who are a generation up. Because these heroines may be screwed, but they’re not sexually repressed. Millennium heroes have two important things: freedom of action. And orgasms. “They are hot messes. And I think it’s a privilege to be a hot mess who isn’t open [us]”.
Female desire is a “feminist issue,” she insists. “I thought it was no big deal to be sexually fulfilled, it was just that little extra. But…
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