We sit down to a cup of tea in the Theatre on the Bay’s function room and Wanda Ventham enthuses about being so close to the beach.
The breaking surf reminds her of growing up in Brighton in the UK, but also that she needs to check on her holiday home in Greece.
Ventham travelled extensively across Europe in the 60s and 70s when she worked for the BBC which shot on location. One of her favourites was working on The Lotus Eaters (1972-3) which took her to Greece.
“It’s not the same place anymore,” said Ventham.
The actress found regular TV work on all manner of productions, from The Saint to Carry on up the Khyber. “I just looked like a little 60s bird, I was easy to cast,” she said.
Ventham found TV work easier than theatre because you learned your lines for the next day, did the work and moved on to the next programme.
“I find repetition difficult in the theatre. This [Quartet] is perfect because it’s almost a month. I think you have to find something fresh all the time and if you do it for long enough, you start making mistakes. You lose your concentration,” she explained.
“I like doing this play because it has comedy, but it also has pathos.”
Ventham and her fellow performers stepped straight off the plane into rehearsals last week, and have already started previewing the show.
Quartet – written by Cape Town-born playwright Ronald Harwood, who won an Oscar for adapting the screenplay of The Piano – is set in a retirement home for musicians, which is gearing up to put on a performance.
Ventham is old friends with fellow performers Delena Kidd (whom she’s known since studying together at the Central School for Speech and Drama in London in the 1950s) and her husband Gary Raymond.
In the musical comedy Kidd plays Jean, who used to be quite the prima donna. She comes to stay in the retirement home, stirring up things for her ex-husband Reginald (Raymond).
John Fraser rounds out the cast of Quartet, which is directed by Richard Digby Day.
“I play the daffy one,” explains Ventham.
“Actually it’s been quite difficult to learn because I come on every time, and I don’t know what I’m going to say as the character. To learn that is quite difficult because you don’t follow on...
“When you’re learning a part you get a cue, something someone says or does leads to your line.
“I’m away with the fairies and they’re worried I’ll be sent away to the funny farm.”
“She’s the daffy one and Delena is the diva and the play is really about her and Gary’s characters.”
At 76 Ventham jokes when she forgets things that it’s time for Denville Hall, a London care home facility for people over 70 who worked professionally as actors, where she regularly visits friends.
Shrinking pensions are not a joke though, whether at home in London or those of her friends in Greece. Still, she’s lucky because she not doing Quartet for the money.
“No, I’ve really retired. Delena rang up and said ‘would you like to do this’ and I thought, ‘I might go to South Africa’.
“I’ve been here before, my son was here. He did a BBC series,” says Ventham.
The series she is referring to is To the Ends of the Earth, which was shot in Richards Bay. Her son is Benedict Cumberbatch, recently seen by South African audiences as Major Steward in War Horse and Peter Guillam in Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy.
Once Quartet’s three week long run in Cape Town is done, it’ll be a quick trip home to London before Ventham and her husband set off for a two week trip to Los Angeles to visit Cumberbatch, where he is filming on the set of JJ Abraham’s second Star Trek as the villain.
She thinks it is ironic that at 34 he is working on his first sci-fi set, when she did the 1970s TV series UFO.
Ventham also thinks it’s funny that her son has a long acting career, but it is his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes for the BBC TV series that has garnered him sudden fame.
“He’s done such good stuff in such a short time. He won the Critics Circle Theatre Award and the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Frankenstein. It was the most extraordinary piece of theatre.”
“He’s done the most wonderful plays in the theatre and terrific television, but it’s this Sherlock thing... every time you pick up a paper or a magazine it says ‘Sherlock in’ or ‘Sherlock says’. It’s quite extraordinary. It takes just one part... “
• Quartet opens tonight (March 21) and runs until April 7, Tuesdays to Saturdays, at the Theatre on the Bay. Tickets are R80-R160, book through Computicket.