‘Frailty and terrible rage’: Linda Bassett on Call the Midwife, her crap-free CV and selling ice creams at Olivier’s Old Vic

‘Every part is an education,” says Linda Bassett. “That’s the glory of being an actor. You learn about human feelings and frailty and rottenness. The writer puts their soul on the page, and you inhabit that. I’ve always felt I was a writer’s actor.” She’s not wrong. Never showy, Bassett’s understated magic has enhanced plays by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Wallace Shawn, Ayub Khan Din and, notably, Caryl Churchill, of whom she is a peerless interpreter. “Auditioning for Caryl was enormous, because that got me started on a trajectory,” she says. From Fen in 1983 to 2021’s What If If Only, her disconcerting clarity has suited Churchill’s plays, work that some audiences find forbidding. “They’re not hard to watch,” Bassett protests. We’re chatting at the Young Vic, where Bassett is rehearsing Care by Alexander Zeldin, another exacting author. Her dog snoozes nearby and I’m showing her my “terrible rage” tote bag, quoting Bassett’s direful monologue from Churchill’s apocalyptic Escaped Alone, where the phrase is said 25 times in succession. “It was the only thing to say at that point. The words fed the feeling, and it was the audience who felt it, not me, which is ideal.” In rehearsal, Churchill is “wonderful, completely non-invasive, but very generous”. Her plays are famously short on stage directions, offering a multiverse of choices. “It’s so distilled, no excess baggage,” Bassett considers. “But there’s only one way to play them, and you’ve just got to find the way.” Theatre wasn’t an obvious path for Bassett (“we weren’t that kind of family”), but the seed was planted at an Easter play at her Sunday school. An older girl couldn’t go on, but four-year-old Linda knew all the lines, was shoved into a daffodil hat and “went down a storm because I was only little. I was in bliss.” Teenage Linda spent two years ushering at the Old Vic during Laurence Olivier’s glory days of landmark work: “I saw it over and over again, except for the bit just before the interval, when I ha…