Prunella Scales will always be remembered for her TV performances in Fawlty Towers and for her expeditions with her husband, Timothy West, in Great Canal Journeys. But she was also a stage actor of vast experience whose career was defined by a natural gift for comedy often, though not exclusively, seen in theatrical partnership with her husband. I got a glimpse of their closeness when I hosted a discussion with West some years ago. Our stage chat seemed to go well but in the interval Pru, as she was universally known, popped backstage to give her husband directorial notes, which he gratefully accepted.
Her long life in the theatre began in 1947 when she was a member of the Old Vic Theatre school set up by Michel Saint-Denis in the bomb-damaged building on London’s Waterloo Road. Her fellow students included Joan Plowright, Denis Quilley and Alan Dobie and future directors such as Frank Dunlop and Christopher Morahan. The rigorous Stanislavskian approach influenced a stage career of a kind few young actors today will ever emulate.
Looking back, what is striking is how often Pru played leading classical roles in a still vibrant regional theatre. She toured as Shakespeare’s Olivia in Twelfth Night and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Oxford Playhouse in the 1950s, was Hermione in The Winter’s Tale at Birmingham Rep in the 1960s, Kate in The Taming of the Shrew at Nottingham Playhouse in the early 1970s and Natalya Petrovna in A Month in the Country at Bristol Old Vic at the end of the decade. She held a passion for the classics that she never lost and that has been inherited by her son, Samuel West.
But Pru also worked consistently in the West End over five decades, often demonstrating her instinct for comedy. In 1954 she appeared in a celebrated Tyrone Guthrie production of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (the source of Hello, Dolly!), which eventually took her and fellow Brit Alec McCowen to Broadway. Numerous other successes followed. In 1968 she was a young flapper, playing opposite Celia Johnson, in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever. In 1980 she was a loyal secretary to Leonard Rossiter’s businessman-hero in Michael Frayn’s Make and Break. Playing opposite her husband, she was also richly funny in a 1986 revival of JB Priestley’s When We Are Married as one of the bourgeois couples who find their nuptials were illegal.
But arguably her finest hour came in 1988 when she played the reigning monarch in Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution, first at the National Theatre and later on television: as she quizzed Anthony Blunt about the authenticity of a work of art, she brilliantly suggested the queen’s mix of intellectual canniness and quiet humour.
Until dementia began to take its toll in 2014 – and even then she continued to do her TV exploration of canals with West – she was rarely off the stage. But, while one thinks of her first and foremost as someone blessed with an instinct for comedy, she had strongly held views about classical training. In 1992, she directed rehearsed readings of two of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at the National Theatre and, in the course of a Platform interview, talked passionately about the tradition of the spoken word. She revealed how she had encouraged schoolchildren to read Pride and Prejudice aloud: “The text came alive and you saw an irony in the writing that you simply couldn’t see on the page.”
She also lamented that she found in young actors “a lack of fluency in classical texts”. She attributed this to diminishing opportunities, but then she had the good fortune to emerge when the classics were part of the backbone of British theatre. That gave her a zeal for the spoken word that permeated her whole career and helps to explain why she was equally unforgettable as Sybil Fawlty and Elizabeth II.
