Caroline Quentin: Men Behaving Badly star on owing 'career to Edinburgh' and on dream Royal Lyceum role

The Men Behaving Badly star said she had performed her first acting role at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in the late 1980s. She went on to perform in plays for the subsequent three years after a stint as a cabaret dancer, giving her "confidence" to start applying for professional jobs as an actor.

Ms Quentin is starring in the pivotal role of Arkadina in Anton Chekov's The Seagull at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh - a part she said she had coveted since playing Masha in the same play in one of her first professional performances.

“I started out as a dancer, essentially a chorus girl,” she said. “I auditioned for a play at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, which I hadn’t really heard of, because variety doesn’t really enter that world - comics and so on. Old school variety at the end of the pier was what I’d been doing. Someone told me to go and audition for this play at the Fringe and I did.”

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From there, Ms Quentin met comedian and writer Arthur Smith, who subsequently cast her in play Trench Kiss at the Gilded Balloon, followed by An Evening With Gary Lineker at Assembly the following year and then Live Bed Show, which became a huge hit.

It later toured to the West End, where she starred with her then-husband Paul Merton.

“I feel like I owe the city a lot,” she said. “I was a dancer-cum-singer and had done a bit of extras work. But it was only when I came to Edinburgh and did plays, suddenly I was playing a leading lady part. They were two-handers, most of them, but suddenly I was an actor.

“Those early Fringe experiences - and I’m sure people of Edinburgh curse the Fringe - I am forever grateful for. It gave me permission to start looking for work as an actor - not a dancer or a singer.”

Ms Quentin performed in the original cast of Les Miserables in London’s West End as a young performer, before being cast as Dorothy in Men Behaving Badly - her first major TV role. She subsequently played Maddy Magellan in Jonathan Creek, before appearing on Strictly Come Dancing in 2020.

She said “a couple of options” to perform as Arkadina in The Seagull elsewhere had previously arisen, however, she held out for Edinburgh.

“I first did this play nearly 40 years ago, when I was playing Masha and it very quickly became my favourite play,” she said.

“I watched Pam Ferris played Arkadina and I thought ‘God, that’s a great part’. I was only in my 20s, but I’ve always had my eye on it over the intervening years.”

Ms Quentin said of the Royal Lyceum role: “When this play I’d longed to do for so long came up, it made sense to me. Next year, I’ll have been working 50 years in this industry and it felt to me like a rounding off of a very long journey.”

She added: “The play is done often, but the fact we’re doing it here and with Mike Poulton’s adaptation, which is genius, [is special]. He is terribly funny. I’m surrounded here by some of the greatest actors. You couldn’t get a better cast for it. I feel we’re honouring the play.”

The actor continued: “I think a lot of people are slightly challenged by the name of Chekov and I don’t know why because he’s a comedy writer really. It’s a funny, funny play, but also an immensely sad play.”

The English language premiere of The Seagull was performed in Glasgow at the Royalty Theatre in 1909 by the Glasgow Repertory Theatre company.

The theatre’s artistic director James Brining, who took up the role earlier this year and is directing the production, previously told The Scotsman the Lyceum’s new production would portray the Russian play “through a Scottish lens”.

The play, which will be performed from October 9 to November 1, also features actors including Forbes Masson, Harmony Rose Bremner, Irene Allan and Lorn Macdonald.

But while most of the cast are Scottish, Ms Quentin is English.

“My character is an actor and we decided she might have lost her accent,” she said. “But I’m occasionally using some Scottish vowels and a few Scottish words. It’s when we are angry or tired or emotional, those of us who have had accents and lost them, they still come through - and that is what I am trying to do here.”

The play is set on a country estate, which Ms Quentin says is “in Russia, but could just as easily be a Scottish estate”.

“It is vast - it has lakes, it has pine trees and forests,” she said. “Our character is an estate manager, but is a ghillie, really.”