Patricia Routledge was an actor of uncommon versatility equally at home in musicals, the classics and modern drama. But, if one had to seize on a defining quality, it was her ability to see the humanity in a variety of eccentrics and outsiders. That was true whether she was playing the absurdly pretentious Hyacinth Bucket (“pronounced bouquet”) in TV’s Keeping Up Appearances or Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals. When she played the latter at the opening of Manchester’s Royal Exchange in 1976, Irving Wardle wrote that her performance was the evening’s highlight in that she gave us “not a grotesque old dragon but a giggling, would-be merry widow”.
Routledge told Michael Parkinson that, for her, acting was “not only about observing but also about absorbing people – I listen a lot”. You saw the results of that in her consummate performances in Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads which she played both on television and, in 1992, on the London stage. In A Woman of No Importance she was a supposedly indispensable clerical worker who ends up in hospitalised solitude: so harrowing was her performance that Frank Rich in the New York Times compared it to Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. In A Lady of Letters, Routledge played a letter-writing busybody who finds a companionship in jail that she had never known in the outside world. What was striking in both cases was Routledge’s profound understanding of loners and solitaries.
Her humanity found a more zestful outlet in a wide range of musicals on both sides of the Atlantic. Having appeared early on in a number of Julian Slade musicals, including The Duenna and Follow That Girl, in 1968 she shared a Tony award for her performance in the short-lived Darling of the Day. In 1976 she had another sadly brief Broadway outing playing all of America’s first ladies in Leonard Bernstein’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But she had a triumphant turn as the Old Lady (with one buttock) in Scottish Opera’s 1988 revival of Bernstein’s Candide and in 1992 she was Nettie Fowler in Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre production of Carousel. When she sang You’ll Never Walk Alone she took a number drenched in sentimental religiosity and delivered it with a moving understated directness.
In a stage career so various it was hard to classify, there were several constants: apart from Routledge’s capacity to humanise the apparently grotesque, there was her deep attachment to the Chichester Festival theatre near which she made her home. In 1969 she appeared in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Pinero’s The Magistrate and Wycherley’s The Country Wife: that last production, with its hero who uses his supposed impotence as a shield for sexual conquest, was seen by Warren Beatty and became the inspiration for his movie Shampoo. Routledge returned to Chichester many times, playing Emilia in Othello (1975), her second Mrs Malaprop (1994) and Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1999) where she escaped from the daunting shadow of Edith Evans by creating her own form of imperious curiosity.
Routledge’s range was impressive. She was in the original 1982 cast of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off playing the housekeeper obsessed by the technical difficulty of juggling a plate of sardines and a telephone. Two years later she was with the RSC in Stratford playing Queen Margaret, to Antony Sher’s Richard III, as a plausibly embittered old scold wrapped in a flag.
In contrast, in 2006 she played the saintly Dame Laurentia McLachlan, in Hugh Whitemore’s The Best of Friends, whom Bernard Shaw described as “an enclosed nun with an unenclosed mind”. There seemed nothing much that Routledge – finally made a dame in 2017 – couldn’t play. But running like a silver thread through her theatrical career was a wide-ranging sympathy for humanity in all its infinite possibilities.
