In conversation with Pandora Collins

Assistant Director Josh Azouz in conversation with power-house actress Pandora Collins.

Josh Azouz: You are a pretty classy actress- I believe you have just come from working at the National theatre with Katie Mitchell on ‘Women of Troy’. Can you tell me how it all started and some of your early experiences of the theatre?

Pandora Collins: Well the reason I wanted to be an actress is because of Jodi Foster in Bugsy Malone. Yeah I just thought she was brilliant, and I wanted to do that. My first experience at the theatre was Guys & Dolls at the National with Bob Hoskins and Julie McKenzie. It was just so thrilling - I was totally knocked out and not only bought the record but stared at the pictures in the inlay and learnt all the words. It was so exciting and such a spectacle. I remember thinking what could be better than doing that every evening.

JA: So with Bugsy and Guys & Dolls, we have a bit of New York gangster theme...

PC: Well my mum was born in New York...also my parents were both massive film buffs and because I was an only child, I was often plonked in front of the TV and grew up watching a lot of American films so maybe that is where the interest lies...

Since of the age of eight I was acting in school and because my talents didn’t lie in academia or sport I just carved out a little niche. Any opportunities to do any sort of acting, play readings, competitions were pounced upon. After my A Levels, I went to drama school, and yes it’s been sporadic ever since....my most interesting side-job was selling Oysters in Whitechapel- so very Dickensian. After going to Guildhall drama school my first job was at Stoke on Trent and then I played bass guitar in an all-female band for about eighteen months before realising that I am supposed to be an actress!

JA: Could you pick out a few highlights in the last ten years?

PC: Over the last couple of years things have enormously improved for me. If you sit around waiting for the phone to ring you will have a nervous breakdown, so I teamed up with a friend of mine, a writer who also wasn’t getting that much work and we created a one woman show for the Edinburgh festival. This subsequently transferred to the New End theatre-Tim Roseman directed- and the whole experience just made me a lot tougher, self-reliant and proactive. As a result of this show, I got into a real momentum and in the last year have worked for six months with Shared Experience and six months at the National, places I’ve always wanted to work, so it was dreams coming true. I don’t think I really knew what I was doing for the first ten years, but as you get older...i don’t know, you maybe get older and wiser...a bit.

JA: What attracted you to Natural Selection at Theatre 503?

PC: The play is funny and very ambitious, and ambitious things must be tried. I also just really wanted to work at 503, even when it was the Latchmere...its a good space with a really brilliant audience and a great reputation. I was up for the challenge of doing something so epic in a beautiful theatre that does have constraints. It is an original play and I haven’t ever seen anything like it.

Part of the attraction was of course playing the role of Fenella. She is a suburban woman who has had certain pressure put on her by her family and her friends and is a very recognisable type of person. Fenella has high aspirations and wants to make something of herself, which means wanting to be a mother, have a husband with a good job and occupy the right place in social society. It’s easy to judge those sorts of characters as very superficial and the real test is not just to show her as a total ogre but for me and Tim to work out ways for the audience to sympathise with her. Fenella is very funny and although is very different has elements in her character which are not dissimilar to Margot in ‘The Good Life’. There is this one particular episode when Margot has a breakdown because she doesn’t think she is funny and thinks she has lost her sense of humour. It’s all quite endearing and I think Fenella takes herself and the world so seriously that she never gets the joke, which could be very funny.

JA: Natural Selection explores a number of colossal ideas and your character in particular comes into contact with marketplace of designer babies. If we found ourselves in a parallel world where natural conception was no longer possible...this sounds like a nightmare, why am I asking this...but if you, Pandora Collins, had to pick a few traits for your child, what would you choose?

PC: Nothing physical...I just hope they wouldn’t get my asthama, hayfever, or bad eye sight. It’s like the same as asking someone what they look for in a partner in those lonely heart columns. Everybody responds in the same way, demanding them to be kind, funny and intelligent. Well what would I want? Of course intelligence and generosity but that is what we are brought up to want. A child with both a musical and a sporting ability probably makes life a bit easier and probably quite fun. I don’t know- maybe I’m not very ambitious for my children. Some people out there, might actually be able to choose it all

JA: Yes possibly you are too balanced for the above question to be a reasonable one...moving swiftly on...If you could choose a skin of a fruit or a vegetable to be your skin, what would you choose and why?

(After understandable suspicions, having just been probed on designer babies, Pandora finally decides to maybe reveal her fruit/vegetable....)

PC: I guess it would be nice to have soft or smooth skin. A nectarine or a peach are both a little fuzzy and I think I already have enough of that in me. I would choose an apricot because it is small, soft, and there is something pure and healthy about them. It may also be rather aspirational on my part to have the skin of an apricot because I reckon it has quite a hardy skin. If I was thicker skinned, I would be less of a neurotic maniac and let things bounce off me but I wouldn’t want the skin of a pineapple, because that might mean no friends. After all, one doesn’t want to be too waxy- although, what about an un-waxed lemon? I mean that would be great. You would smell fantastic and have a skin that is both hard and smooth.

Pandora Collins finally decided on an un-waxed lemon.

To see and smell (the theatre is very intimate) this fantastic un-waxed lemon strutting her stuff, check out Paul Jenkins’ ‘Natural Selection’ which is directed by Tim Roseman and runs from 6th-31st May at Theatre503.