Deirdre Davis on idyllic Pitlochry life and role in Snake in the Grass

“Oh, come on!” laughs actor Deirdre Davis, when I ask her what exactly drew her away from Glasgow to live in Pitlochry back in 2006.

“It’s an amazing place to live! I love Pitlochry, it’s beautiful, and of course it’s got a train station, so you can get to other places very easily.”

The move happened in the midst of Davis’s time as the hard-bitten Eileen Donachie in the Scottish soap River City, which she was in from 2002 until 2016.

Despite filming in Dumbarton, however, the relocation wasn’t too much of a stretch.

“When I was doing River City I’d work in blocks of five or six days, so they would just put me up somewhere,” she says. “It was more of a schlep, but I got there.”

Paul Thomas Hickey and Deirdre Davis in River City, 2015. Image: Alan Peebles/BBC.

What drew her to leave Glasgow, a hub city for Scottish actors if ever there was one, and resettle in Perthshire?

“We’d always loved Highland Perthshire, and my husband’s mother lived in Auchterarder, so we used to visit a lot,” she says. “I thought it was the most beautiful part of the world, and we just fell in love with the place.

“For a long time we said, we’ll move there in the future, then one day we just said, what are we waiting for? Let’s do it now.”

Pitlochry ‘leaves something in your heart’

Then her youngest child was nearly three. Now her eldest child’s family, including three grandchildren, live in Pitlochry, and Davis’s parents both moved up before they passed away.

“It’s just one of those places,” she says.

“You come on your holidays or you pay it a visit, and it just leaves a wee something in your heart. You need to go back, then eventually you need to live there, and that’s what we did.”

With life in Pitlochry comes work, notably several summer repertory seasons at Pitlochry Festival Theatre (even Davis can’t remember whether she’s done four or five).

Yet this month she’s making the journey along the Tay, for Dundee Rep Theatre’s new production of Alan Ayckbourn’s 2002 family drama Snake in the Grass.

Directed by the Rep’s artistic director Andrew Panton, it also stars regular Rep actors Ann Louise Ross and Emily Winter.

Ann Louise Ross, Emily Winter and Deirdre Davis during the read-through of Snake in the Grass. Image: Supplied.

“Andrew asked me one day to come and read for this part, and then he said, you’ve got the job,” says Davis, who was last in a Dundee Rep production – she’s trusting her memory here – in a 1992 version of Frederick Knott’s original stage version of Dial M for Murder.

“I’d seen a production of Snake in the Grass before at Pitlochry, about 15 years ago,” she says. “I thought it was really fun then, a great play, and a production I remembered.

“It’s three middle-aged women on a stage, and let me tell you, how often does that happen? Then of course, I’m working with Annie and Emily, so it’s a dream job. What’s not to love?”

Deirdre Davis: ‘It’s good to play irritating people’

Ayckbourn’s murder-mystery is set entirely in the garden of a suburban house, and is about two sisters, Annabel (Davis) and Miriam (Winter), who return to the family home after the death of their father to uncover long-buried secrets.

Ross is Alice, their father’s former nurse.

“What I like about Annabel is that she’s insufferable,” says Davis. “She’s a snob, she’s bossy, she thinks she’s in charge of the world and can sort everything out, but there’s a lot going on under the surface which comes out as events unfold.

“The Annabelle you see at the top is not the Annabelle you see as it progresses, and certainly not at the end. It’s been really interesting, because it’s good to play people who are irritating and not very sympathetic.”

Davis describes the play as “typical Ayckbourn”.

Deirdre Davis is Annabelle in Snake in the Grass. Image: Supplied.

“He writes very well for families and people that know each other… people who antagonise each other but still have a connection, a bond,” she says.

“Basically it’s that thing about, you always hurt the ones you love, and nobody irritates you as much as your brother or your mother or your-sister in-law. Nobody knows how to press your buttons as much.

“It’s very funny, with a lot of gallows humour and some farcical aspects, but it takes a very dark turn. No spoilers, but it does leave you thinking, is this a comedy? What’s going on here?”

‘Ridiculousness’ of play helps escapism

Up next for Davis are touring dates to Edinburgh and Aberdeen for the version of A Streetcar Named Desire which debuted at Pitlochry Festival Theatre to great acclaim last year.

Beyond that, she hopes she doesn’t leave it so long until her next appearance on the Dundee Rep stage.

“I hope audiences come away from Snake in the Grass thinking it was really good fun, and that they’ve had a laugh and maybe been a bit thought-provoked by some of the subject matter,” she says.

Andrew Panton, Dundee Rep artistic director, at the Snake in the Grass read-through. Image: Alastair More.

“Hopefully there are a few scares too, or certainly moments where there should be a sharp intake of breath, but it’s ultimately entertainment.

“The world’s a scary place at the moment, so it’s nice to come to a theatre and be taken out of yourself. To watch three middle-aged women arguing about this bizarre situation, then come away having felt you’ve seen those relationships in all their ridiculousness.

“I hope people will still be talking about it in the bar or in the car on the way home.”

Snake in the Grass is at Dundee Rep Theatre from Friday September 13 until Saturday October 5.