She plays a woman who finds the resilience to keep going amid trying times in her latest role. And for the last 12 months, Alison Peebles has done the very same.
The actor has endured a round-the-world scramble to outrun the global lockdowns, broken bones and freezing winter days on windswept Scottish islands in the last year.
And all against the backdrop of a pandemic.
It’s all the more remarkable given how the entertainment industry ground to a halt, with production on film and TV having to tiptoe through the restriction cracks and theatres lying dark for a year.
Yet it’s been a prolific spell for Alison, who has featured in a host of film and telly productions in a 30 year career.
“I feel very lucky,” said the 67-year-old, speaking to P.S. from her home on Glasgow’s southside. “There have been a lot of people in dire circumstances in the last year. Now I’ll probably be facing the famine when everybody else is working.”
© Andrew CawleyAlison was on “the trip of a lifetime” with her cousin in New Zealand at the start of 2020 when she suddenly found herself having to get home to the other side of the world as the Antipodes threw down the travel bans which saw them keep Covid at bay.
She said: “We’d been there for several weeks, but I had to cut the trip short. My cousin stayed on with her family in New Zealand, but I had to fly home, it wasn’t practical to stay.
“So there I was on the other side of the world racing home to beat the pandemic. It was a nerve-racking flight. There was sudden talk of a pandemic, and although everyone was wearing masks, there was no social distancing on the flight or at the airport. It was ridiculous and it was quite scary.
“When my friend picked me up at the airport she said: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve sanitised the whole car.’ I thought: ‘Oh my God. Things are that bad here, too?’ I hadn’t realised.”
© BBC Studios, ScotlandA two-week post-travel quarantine gave way to the same pattern of life many actors faced, of financial uncertainty and lack of clarity of work.
But Alison has emerged with a healthy roster of projects, in spite of the challenges faced by the industry.
Along with the likes of actress Daniela Nardini, she’s performing in Mull Theatre’s new online programme of animated monologues, entitled Braw Tales.
Alison’s episode is The Shark Was Aware Of Me. It’s written by author Alan Bissett and sees her play a woman dealing with a difficult diagnosis, finding unexpected connection with the inhabitants of an aquarium.
She said: “It sounds very esoteric, but it’s actually really beautiful. The woman communicates with these fishes and sharks. It’s actually really beautiful, in quite a profound way.
“It’s all about life continuing.”
It’s the same for Alison. The actor has lived with multiple sclerosis (MS) since a diagnosis in the early 2000s.
Yet despite living with an autoimmune disease, she was surprised not to find herself on the official shielding list during Covid.
“I am technically vulnerable because my immune system is affected, but I wasn’t in the vulnerable category.
“I know of people with heart conditions, motor neuron disease and cancer who weren’t being told they were in the vulnerable category but probably should have been. I think some of that wasn’t done properly. I didn’t get a letter to say I was in the vulnerable category when I probably should have. I behaved as if I was anyway.”
When restrictions permitted, Alison made the most of the freedoms.
She filmed two series of CBeebies series Molly And Mac in which she plays Mrs Jupiter, and also travelled to the Scottish islands to film The Road Dance, a the feature film based on the series of novels by STV newsreader John MacKay.
“We were filming with an international crew, people from Russia and Germany, and most of them had never set foot in Scotland before.
“The weather on Lewis was the worst October weather you could imagine. And most of the filming was outside. These guys said they’d never seen anything like it. We were all like, ‘This? This is Scotland!’
“It was a tough shoot in harsh conditions, but I really enjoyed it.”
© Andrew CawleyAlison plays Old Peg in fact-based story, set in the First World War era on the islands, who witnesses an attack on a young girl.
“It’s a story that has been told in different ways before,” she said. “But it is very pertinent.”
Alison also joined the cast of the forthcoming Richard III story, directed by Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Launderette, Philomena, High Fidelity) and written by Steve Coogan with Jeff Pope.
It tells the story of the discovery of the king’s remains under a supermarket car park. And there was even time to fit in an unfortunate trip to A&E in between her hectic schedules.
“I had an accident in my kitchen at home,” said Alison. “My balance isn’t great. I tripped as I turned when I was making my tea. One of the strange things with MS is you know you’re falling, but you can’t stop yourself. It feels like you’re a giant Redwood, a slow fall and, even if you try to stop yourself, the brain doesn’t get the message out in time.
“So I basically crashed back against the kitchen door. I didn’t have a single mark on me, but everything was pushed forward – and that broke my collar bone.”
The doctor left her with even more bad news following the fall.
“My collar bone is sticking up now. They’ll only operate if it’s going to get in the way. The doctor said to me: ‘I’m afraid your career as a swimwear model is over…’
‘I thought: ‘Oh dear, that’s my Plan B gone.’”
While Alison has fears for the return of theatre (the latest guidance on restriction lifting suggests a space of 2.6m between performers, and 2.5 between audiences – impacting massively on capacities and commercial viability) she has been developing two projects in hope more than expectation.
Bruises From The Cracks, which she’s developing with Still Game actress Maureen Carr’s Whistherface production company, looks at the life of older women struggling with mental ill-health.
“It’s about a funny, difficult, traumatised woman, shut-off in a high rise somewhere,” she said. “We’re working on the script just now, and despite the subject matter, we want it to have humour.”
And she’s also harking back to a memorable encounter with an entertainment icon.
She said: “I worked at the Edinburgh Fringe when Quentin Crisp was doing his one-man show in the 1970s. I was operating the spotlight and doing a bit of stage management, making sure his velvet jacket was brushed down and all that.
“My agent recently said that I looked quite like Quentin. One of the reasons for me playing him is because he said himself that he would have liked to have been born a woman. The transgender thing didn’t alter significantly during his lifetime, but nowadays he might have been able to do something about that.”
Myths of the Lost King debunked
Alison says that the forthcoming film about the real-life discovery of Richard III’s bones will lay some myths to rest.
The project, entitled, The Lost King, which was written by and stars Steve Coogan, is still shooting around the country, including quite recently in Edinburgh.
It follows the story of the woman who found the remains of the king in a Leicester car park.
Alison said: “I play a member of the Richard III Society who does a bit of research and finds out about it. The way Richard III is portrayed is down to Shakespeare, and that’s actually down to the Tudors. The Tudors beat the Plantagenets at the Battle of Bosworth Field and then they blackened his name.
“When you think of Richard III, you think of Lawrence Olivier playing him with the black wig, the black brows, the thin lips and the hunchback.
“It’s all lies. He was considered a very good king at the time.
“And he didn’t have a hunchback, they discovered he had scoliosis, he didn’t have claw fingers and all this kind of stuff.”
Mull Theatre’s five Braw Tales are available to see online at vimeo.com/antobarandmulltheatre
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