Doon MacKichan

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'My whole life has been a black comedy'
Doon Mackichan has spent her life causing offence and hilarity. The Day Today and Smack the Pony star tells Catherine Shoard why she relishes starring in a shocking Joe Orton play
Catherine Shoard
The Guardian,
December 4 2008

It has been a while since Doon Mackichan was last hung, drawn and quartered for laughing at the suffering of children. There was a week in August 2001 when you couldn't pass a newsstand without seeing her handsome, sparrowhawk face, forehead partially obscured by the word "evil" or "depraved".

The Brass Eye paedophile special is now mostly remembered as virtuoso satire, so it's easy to forget what a stink it caused at the time. And it was Mackichan, who played TV presenter Swanchita Haze, who bore the brunt of it. People expected that sort of thing from Chris Morris, but Doon was a woman with - gulp - children of her own. "[Mackichan] had seen herself as a major comedy force in the making," wrote the Mail. "She even dreamt of becoming a film star. But with the Brass Eye disaster as her epitaph, all those plans lie in tatters."

Looking back, it's hard to say her career didn't suffer. There were two more seasons of Smack the Pony, the girly Channel 4 sketch show with Sally Phillips and Fiona Allen, but to diminishing returns. There were wifely roles in ropey sitcoms. There was theatre. Then came a two-year break for unhappier reasons (of which more later). And now she's back, in a play that, well, laughs at the suffering of children. Adults, too. Especially those six feet under.

Joe Orton's Loot, like Brass Eye, is comedy that sets out to shock. Don't be fooled by its age; although the play was first performed in 1965, Loot has weathered better than, say, a TV parody of late-90s news shows. Death doesn't date as a cultural taboo; likewise religion. Rereading Loot is like having a shower when you hadn't realised the boiler's broken: unexpectedly shocking.

"Yep, it's full on," says Mackichan, eating a tuna sandwich between rehearsals in London. "There's this one line about a really great brothel run by Pakistanis who pimp out their kids for Mars bars." She smiles: an attractive smile, heavy on the lippy. "I'm like, 'Oh we'll cut that, won't we?' Well, no, we can't, because what about all the other things people might find offensive? Cut them all and you won't have much of a play left."

Other lines trouble her. Orton's gleeful description of a sexual assault, complete with tooth-breaking detail. "That specific image is just really horrible. Do you lose a portion of your audience when you leave that in? Do people stop thinking it's a great play? Or as my mum would say, 'Ooh, Orton's so kinky; yes, I love all that.' "

Doon plays Fay, an Irish Catholic home nurse and a prolific serial killer (87 in one week alone). She has lately buried her seventh husband and has her eighth in her crosshairs, having just dispatched his wife with a syringe of poison. Loot takes place on the day of the wife's funeral, and charts the power struggle between Fay, Hal (whose mother is being buried), Dennis, Hal's boyfriend, with whom he has robbed a bank and put the money in mum's coffin, and Detective Truscott, the sinister inspector who comes calling.

Orton's stage instructions put Kay in her late 20s; other than that Mackichan, 46, is a good fit. She is Celtic, by nurture at least. She grew up in Surrey but moved to Fife with her family when she was nine. She survived the transition, she says, by acting, specialising in "posh bitches". This is something she still does: she is a natural authoritarian, physically pneumatic, temperamentally tough - a few years back she swam the English channel with a team of paratroopers.

"Yes, I could kill someone," she says, without thinking too hard about it. "It must be so easy to just nip a needle in, or hold a pillow over an old person's face. The power and the buzz you'd get." She has been boning up on True Crime magazine to further understand her character's homicidal motivation. "But I just can't read the books. There's such an orgasm about they way they're written. 'Women who kill! Viciously!' When it comes to sex and violence, we're an island of obsessives. I mean, how does it help people to know the details of how someone was physically tortured?"

Ten years ago, Mackichan got her fingers burned over an Anglican sketch on her Radio 4 show, Doon Your Way, but it hasn't left her any more on-message when it comes to religion. "It's been extraordinary finding out what Catholics actually believe!" she says of the research process. "All the rituals and superstition. The whole voyeurism of talking to someone behind a little screen. The idea that you can think, OK, I'll be a bitch, then on Sunday I'll say, 'Oh, I was a bit of a bitch' and then feel great!"

She is not religious herself, "but I don't think I'm in an atheistic universe. I do think there's a higher power". Has she ever prayed? "Oh, I've been down on my knees many times." She pauses and then roars with laughter - it's a genuine, accidental Orton-ism.

It turns out that Mackichan has had an extremely tough few years. Her father recently died. She is in the process of getting divorced from her husband, Common As Muck actor Anthony Barclay, with whom she has three children, India, 11, Louis, 10, and Ella-Rose, four. And, three years ago, Louis contracted leukaemia. Much of the past three years has been spent with him in hospital. He is now in remission, but shadows still hollow out her face. She wells up frequently, and there is something frayed behind the raucous laugh and actorly tics. "I do find authority hard to deal with now," she growls, after an assistant gives us a 10-minute warning that she needs to get back to work. "I feel a bit of an anarchist. I don't think I could work for someone who was an arsehole any more." She gulps down some fruit juice. "I can't actually have confrontations with people. It's too much. I'm a single muvva with three kids and a show to do." She laughs but she's dead serious.

When things were at their worst, she says, her monopoly on heartache was hard to handle. "People would tut behind me in a supermarket queue and I'd have to go, 'Please, go ahead of me, you've obviously got somewhere to go. I'm just going back to the children's cancer ward.' I once had an actress telling me her hair was falling out because of her new kitchen and I thought, I'm not going to say anything, because this is quite interesting, because I remember how I was before it all." And how was she before it all? "Quite selfish, neurotic. Up my own arse. It's made me very tough. I do think I have endurance beyond the pale."

When Louis was well enough, Mackichan took her children with her to Africa to shoot a BBC2 series, Taking the Flak, loosely based on John Simpson's reporting from poverty-stricken, war-ravaged places. After such harrowing experiences, how she can cope with her relatively comfortable existence? "You walk into your house and you go: I'm a millionaire. I'm a princess; I live in a palace. And you think: I don't have a lot of shoes, but I do have too many shoes. You look at yourself and think: Party's over, mate. Time to be useful."

And yet she is not an aid worker in Africa. She is in north London, rehearsing a play. "I did think, I can't go back to acting. It's too vain, too ridiculous. I was going to retrain as a play specialist in Louis' cancer ward. But this is what I've done for 20 years. It's what I do."

She's right. Mackichan is a natural born thesp, right down to her floaty black blouse and stripy woollen leg-warmers. Slice her in half and you would see "actor" written right through the middle of her. "I have a real mission now to be in work that will be cathartic for people. [Work] that's really honest about just how fucking hard it is to stay afloat."

Loot isn't exactly what she had in mind, she admits, but its no-nonsense attitude to tragedy has been cathartic. "My whole life lately has been a bit of a black comedy." She snorts. Might she consider turning it into one? "There's a lot of mileage in a children's cancer-ward comedy. All the opening curtains and waving at people being sick into bowls. You could set it in the tiny coffin-like kitchen where only the adults are allowed. You see these little bald children running past the window. It was like suddenly being in a war."

Could she really bear to return there, even imaginatively? "I don't know. They haunt me, those nighttime corridors. The characters, too: the carers and nurses and staff and the petty quarrels. And getting high on Quality Street till 3am. But I would like to."

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I've always thought she was a brilliant comedy actor, and whenever I've seen her interviewed she always comes across as genuine and nice. Good luck to her.