Michael Alexander speaks to River City actress Lesley Hart about growing up in the Mearns, her route into the arts and her latest Sherlock Holmes-adapted play now on at Pitlochry Festival Theatre.
Stonehaven-raised actress Lesley Hart is a household name to many for playing feisty fast-tongued copper Lou Caplan in BBC Scotland’s River City.
But in an interview with The Courier, the award-winning playwright and writer has revealed that when she first stepped into theatre to play a “baddie”, she didn’t take it that seriously.
“When I first joined my local youth theatre, Stonehaven Youth Theatre, I just did it because my pals were going,” she says.
“I just wanted to hang out. I didn’t really take it seriously.
“It was just a daft kind of local youth theatre play – a western spoof!
“I was playing a baddie. Like a grotesque kind of cowboy baddie.
“That was my first kind of acting role.
“But then the first time I actually walked on stage in front of an audience, something got me.
“That was my ‘bitten by the bug’ moment!
“From that moment on, every time I stepped out on stage I thought ‘yes, this is for me’.
“The seed was planted.”
Following a drama career
As a pupil at Mackie Academy in Stonehaven, Lesley took her Standard Grade and Higher in drama.
She had a teacher who “really encouraged” her and said: “you can do this”.
Lesley recalls that she didn’t intend going to drama school.
She’d decided to go to university to do something “completely different”.
But when her application to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) was successful, she realised “that was the right thing to do”, and she’s never looked back.
Lesley graduated from RSAMD in 2000.
Her stage work includes It Was A Beautiful Day (Edinburgh Traverse Theatre), Shimmer (Edinburgh Traverse Theatre), Outlyings Islands (Royal Court and Edinburgh Traverse Theatre), Among Broken Hearts (Bush and Edinburgh Traverse Theatre), Tiny Dynamite (Paines Plough) and Nightingale And Chase (Tron).
Lesley has also made her mark as a writer. She was awarded Playwrights Studio Scotland’s New Playwrights Award in 2011.
Her plays include Safe Keeping (Paines Plough), World Domination (A Play, A Pie & A Pint/Sherman Theatre), Role Shift (Birds of Paradise), The Fundraiser (Horsecross Arts), Flame Proof, 3 Seconds (PPP/Traverse Theatre), Saint One (PPP/Aberdeen Performing Arts), Personal Best (BBC Radio Scotland).
For Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Lesley co-wrote Plunge Day with Sally Reid – a short digital play for young people which featured in the Pitlochry Festival Theatre 2020 #LightHopeJoy season.
Acting also saw her appear as a prison officer in the 2018 film Wild Rose.
Her profile even saw her secure a weekly “wax lyrical” column in Aberdeen-based newspaper The Press & Journal from 2003 to 2011.
When it comes down to it, though, what does she prefer – acting or writing? TV or theatre?
“I love it all!” she enthuses.
“Variety is the spice!
“But also it’s really healthy to be doing a mixture of things. I think they all kind of illuminate and feed into each other. It’s good to have a good mix of different things that you are doing.”
Love of River City
Lesley has been a regular character in River City for five years, which she loves.
When she first landed the role of Lou Caplan, the character was presented to her as a “hot mess lesbian cop”.
She says the wonderful thing about River City is that working with the other actors feels like a “bit of a family”.
Being in that type of show also makes it the longest running job that an actor is likely to find. This she says is a “wonderful thing”.
But does the show’s profile mean she now gets recognised more in the street?
“Sometimes!” she says.
“People are always lovely – I never get any trouble, and it’s usually people who love the show or husbands of people who love the show, so they claim anyway!
“The amount of taxi drivers who have said ‘I don’t watch it but my wife does!’ and then are able to recount back to me more of my stories than I can remember!” she laughs.
River City films for six months of the year.
For the other six months, she tends to focus on theatre and takes advantage of any other opportunities that come her way whether that be TV work or radio plays.
While TV is “brilliant”, it’s theatre where she fell in love with the job that she does, and where her skills, applicable to all genres, are rooted.
It’s appropriate then that her latest project, following on from the challenges that faced theatre and the arts during the Covid-19 pandemic, takes her back to a theatre environment close to her heart.
New adaptation of Sherlock Holmes
Lesley has written Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Lipstick, Ketchup and Blood.
It’s an exciting new adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1887 classic Sherlock Holmes adventure A Study in Scarlet.
Performed in Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s outdoor amphitheatre nestled in the theatre’s Explorers Garden, it premièred on June 8 and runs until July 7.
In a blasted world, two survivors – a doctor and an actor – pass the time by staging their favourite story salvaged from the flames: A Study in Scarlet, the origin story of Sherlock Holmes.
But when tensions arise around casting, more than dead bodies start to surface…
“In a way it is a completely new adaptation,” she says, “but what I’ve done is I’ve created a framing story around the traditional Sherlock Holmes story.
“Essentially the situation is its two remaining survivors in a marooned place, a destroyed world.
“There may or may not be other people elsewhere but these people are essentially alone in an almost uninhabitable place.
“One is an actor, one is a doctor and one of the things that they salvaged is A Study in Scarlet – or at least two thirds of it.
“For something to do as much as anything else they put this play on every day.
“It’ the actor’s project. But you’ve got two people who have befriended each other because they’ve had to. They are cohabiting.
“By meeting each other and doing this project together they give each other a new lease of life. That sort of draws a parallel with Sherlock and Watson.
“But the play is not just about people trying to entertain themselves for a sense of structure. It starts to be about their own lives as well.”
Challenges
One of the challenges facing Lesley was how to honour Arthur Conan Doyle’s “very plotty complicated detective story” that people love, while at the same time deliver what is an “essentially quite unplugged” production with an underlying message of climate disaster.
It was conceived with the beautiful outdoor amphitheatre setting of Pitlochry Festival Theatre in mind.
Watching a play set in a destroyed world from such a beautiful setting might give a keener sense of what could be lost, she believes.
“There’s a certain amount of imagining you would want to salvage something from the world before it all went wrong,” she adds.
“There’s a certain amount of nostalgia in recreating this thing that belonged in the world before it all collapsed.
“They have a dispute between them and the doctor character starts to argue to play a bigger part and when that happens, from there on everything starts to change a bit.
“So it feels like a play for today but it’s also two people trying to preserve something from the past as well.”
The play features Tom Richardson (The Prince and the Pauper, New Vic Theatre) as Ash and Deirdre Davis (Eileen Donachie in River City, BBC Scotland, and the films Orphans and Get Duked) as Harry.
The production is directed by actor and writer Marc Small with design by Pitlochry Festival Theatre’s artistic director Elizabeth Newman, sound by Matthew Tomlinson, movement directed by Lesley Hutchison and lighting by Jeanine Byrne.
She’s particularly grateful to Elizabeth Newman for “reaching out to people” who work in Scottish theatre and inviting them to suggest work.
She’s also been “blown away” by the Pitlochry company’s ability to run different shows at the same time.
“They are extremely match fit because of everything they are juggling and everything they do,” she says.
“They are some of the most skilled and exciting companies of actors around at the moment”.
Impact of Covid-19
There’s no doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic has been a “really bleak time for theatre”.
So much so, she says, it could almost be a virus that was “designed to completely wipe out the theatre as an art”.
Nevertheless, despite the hardships and in some cases the loss of livelihoods, people have been extremely resourceful and innovative.
Some of these innovations, such as the Pitlochry Sound Stage or live streaming of plays, she hopes will continue alongside more traditional theatre experiences.
While she’s optimistic about theatre getting back on its feet, she also hopes the industry can become a “better version of itself than it was before.”
*Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Lipstick, Ketchup and Blood, June 8-July 7, Pitlochry ~Festival Theatre, pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com
