When I was a teenager in the 1970s, Friday night TV viewing meant just one thing: The Good Life. My family would huddle around the box to watch the adventures of chirpy Tom and his little wife Barbara, who turned their Surbiton semi into a self-sufficient smallholding, much to the horror of their snobbish neighbours, who favoured gin and tonic in the garden rather than goats.
Like millions of others, my parents and my friends' parents loved the programme. Our dads were probably all a little in love with Felicity Kendal's eternally perky, dungaree-clad Barbara. My contemporaries and I had a different reaction: Barbara got right up our noses. I remember once playing the balloon game, and Kendal was the first to be voted out, ahead of Adolf Hitler. Niceness can be so much more irritating than pure evil.
Over 25 years later I am sitting opposite Kendal in a London rehearsal room. The astonishing thing about Kendal is that she barely looks a day older than she did in The Good Life. Her face may be a trifle more lined, but she still resembles a pretty little cat who has just acquired the keys to an entire dairy. Her figure is absurdly girlish for a woman of 55.
Just as well: Kendal is about to star as Flora in Charlotte Jones's hit play Humble Boy, which opened at the National Theatre last summer and tomorrow transfers to the West End. Humble Boy is a comic-tragic version of Hamlet. It transposes Elsinore to the Cotswolds, and transforms Hamlet into Felix, a plump, unhappy astrophysicist grieving over his father's recent death. Gertrude becomes Flora Humble, a queen bee and rather merry widow in her late 50s who has just had a nose job, and has a close but difficult relationship with her troubled son.
Flora is a first for Kendal. After years of creating roles in a string of plays by the likes of Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn and Simon Gray, she is for the first time taking over a role from another actor. It is perhaps a sign of how much Kendal wanted to play Flora that she doesn't mind following in the footsteps of no less a personage than Diana Rigg.
"I'd never considered 'taking over' before," she says. "Doing a part fresh is interesting; stepping into someone else's shoes isn't. But this caught me by surprise. As soon as I saw the play I knew I wanted to play Flora. There was something in the writing that I fell for - the way it goes for the guts of an emotion but isn't at all sentimental. And I felt I understood Flora. She is someone lots of women would understand. She is a woman who always thought she would be more than she turned out to be. Every woman has those emotions, those feelings that you are too old and that you have missed the boat."
Kendal doesn't come across as a woman who looks or feels as if she has missed the boat. After all, her career has brought her TV fame, as well as plenty of leading roles on the West End stage. She has been a fixture in the tabloids, which have been fascinated by her love life, particularly her relationship (now ended) with Stoppard.
But Flora represents more than just a good, meaty part for an actress of a certain age. Flora is a first for Kendal, who has played sexy, vain, ditzy and daffy and even self- obsessed - but almost invaribaly fundamentally nice. Flora is by no means a villain, but she is a complex woman whose honesty can also make her very cruel, and whose honey-pot attractiveness has made her emotionally lazy. A generation of grandfathers in cardigans may weep, but Flora is really Kendal's opportunity to throw off the image of nice little Barbara for ever. "So many roles for women demand that you make the audience fall in love with you or sympathise with you, but Flora isn't written like that at all. She is an attractive woman, but when you play her you don't have to worry about being attractive in any way. I find that interesting," she says.
Not that Kendal is complaining about the way her career has turned out, pointing out that actors should only "carp about the roles that you didn't get when you've got bugger all, and that hasn't been the case for me". But there is a touch of wistfulness in her voice when she talks about the Shakespearean roles that haven't come her way. Ironically, one of the roles she would most like is Gertrude in Hamlet, a part that has always struck me as being rather thankless. "Oh no," says Kendal. "Gertrude is a very interesting woman. It is those younger Shakespearean roles - Ophelia and Miranda - who are the real pills. Thank goodness I am too old to play Miranda."
Kendal was busy doing sitcom in her mid-20s when she might have gone to the Royal Shakespeare Company, and having small children made it impractical later on, but she does feel the lack. "I think that if you don't go to Stratford early on, you miss a beat in your career - you are never perhaps taken quite as seriously. But of course if you ask me if I would have swapped everything I've done for something else, the answer must be no. I've been lucky enough to be in lots of really good new plays by terrific writers like Alan Ayckbourn and Peter Shaffer, and if I've never been at the Royal Court it wasn't for want of trying. I auditioned there for years and never got anything. I am obviously not seen as that kind of actress. I think people stream you very early on and that is the stream that you swim in."
Kendal spent her childhood touring India and performing in Shakespeare plays with her family's theatre company, an experience immortalised in the Merchant Ivory film Shakespeare Wallah. When she told her actor-manager father that she intended to leave India to try her luck as an actress in England, he was not encouraging. "You stupid little bugger," he said. "They won't appreciate you." He was of course quite wrong, but in a way I think he might also have been just a little bit right. In Humble Boy Flora says: "When I was little I always thought that I was marked out, special, that I was on the verge of something momentous. I used to tingle with anticipation." Many women feel like that when they are young and, once they are past a certain age, have to come to terms with the humdrum reality and ordinariness of their lives. I feel like that, and I'd sneak a guess that Kendal does, too.
· Humble Boy is at the Gielgud Theatre, London WC2, from tomorrow. Box office: 020-7494 5066.
