To mischief born: Penelope Keith was a class comic act both on and off stage
Penelope Keith, who has died aged 86, became justly famous for displaying a classy hauteur laced with mischief in TV sitcoms such as The Good Life and To the Manor Born. But I can vouch for the fact that something of that quality, honed by a sophisticated comic technique, lay within Penny herself. I first met her when I worked at Lincoln Theatre Royal, where she was a member of the company, in the early 1960s. I vividly recall her surveying a voluminous exhibition of paintings by a local artist in the theatre foyer, magisterially commenting: “Busy lady!” and sweeping out. Such style and assurance in a 23-year-old was rare.
The mischief was also there from the start. A year or so later I found Penny doing small parts at the RSC where she gained a certain notoriety even as one of the crowd in Julius Caesar: when Mark Antony had urged the citizens to lend him their ears, her voice had been heard to pierce that of the throng with a cry of “Ave an ear then.” She was clearly destined for bigger things and indeed starred as an acid-tongued murderee in the first play I ever reviewed for the Guardian, Francis Durbridge’s Suddenly at Home, in 1971.
But comedy was clearly her forte and the making of her was her performance in Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests at Greenwich theatre and then the West End in 1974. As the strait-laced Sarah who finds herself susceptible to the advances of her lecherous brother-in-law she brilliantly suggested a woman whose emotions had long been buried under assiduous domesticity. “She can rouse the house to hilarity,” wrote one critic, “with the straight delivery of a line like, ‘I’ve had a lot of nervous trouble’ while polishing the dining table as she speaks.” In fact, she cleaned the silver as if she wished to do it a personal injury, which made her whoops of delight when Tom Courtenay’s Norman suggested a dirty weekend in Bournemouth even funnier.
Felicity Kendal was also a member of that company and they were memorably paired in The Good Life: as Kendal pointed out, the fact that the two of them plus Richard Briers and Paul Eddington had about 50 years of rep experience behind them was a key factor in the show’s success. Penny capitalised on her TV fame in a number of theatrical hits. In Michael Frayn’s Donkeys’ Years she was hilarious as an Oxbridge master’s wife filled with thwarted desire, myopically addressing a lover’s heart-rending address to the wrong man. She was also striking in two sumptuous Shaw revivals: as a silk-trousered king’s mistress in The Apple Cart she romped fastidiously, and as the eponymous heroine of The Millionairess who feigns poverty in her desperation for human contact she exuded a stylish solitariness.
A born comedian, she worked her way through many of the classic roles: Judith Bliss in Hay Fever, Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit, Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. But she had the capacity to go beyond comedy. Early in her career she was impressive as one of the sexually frustrated daughters in Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba. Later she was no less powerful as Hester Collyer in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea: when her test-pilot lover announced that he was abandoning her, the flicker of pain that crossed her face became the mirror to her tortured soul. On the whole, however, she avoided the icier regions of high tragedy. What we treasured was her ability to make us laugh and to suggest that under the starched conventionality of upper-class English womanhood lurked impishness, mischief and a desire for adventure.