The Harold Pinter Theatre | ChicanePictures

I kept meaning to catch up with musical theatre icon Bonnie Langford and finally I did so over the weekend after a matinée performance of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels at London’s Savoy Theatre.

Bonnie plays the glamorous divorcée Muriel Enbanks and signed this sketch of her as the Lady of the Lake from Spamalot.

Ever since winning the talent show Opportunity Knocks as a six year old and taking to the stage a year later in Gone With The Wind, Bonnie has been a crowd favourite. She has played all the big shows – Cats, Me and My Girl and the role of Roxy Hart in Chicago on both the West End and Broadway stages.

She began playing The Lady of the Lake in the UK tour in early 2012 before a three month run at the Harold Pinter Theatre (formerly The Comedy Theatre) later in 2012, then two stints at the Playhouse Theatre in May-November 2013 and February-March 2014.

British actress Cherie Lunghi is currently appearing in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End. In one of her biographical blurbs, Cherie was described as a ‘leading ingénue’ at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late 70s. An ingénue is a stock character, typically beautiful, gentle, sweet, virginal and often naive – the usual foil to a vamp or a femme fatale. Her roles at the RSC included Perdita, Cordelia and Viola.

She then left to play Guinevere (probably more of a vamp) in John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) and pursue a film and TV career.

At the Pinter she plays the conventional Victorian woman, Gwendolen Fairfax – Lady Bracknell’s sophisticated, intellectual, cosmopolitan and utterly pretentious daughter who is in love with Wilde’s protagonist, Jack, whom she knows as Earnest. It’s a name she is fixated upon and will not marry a man without that moniker that “inspires absolute confidence”. Ingénue or vamp? Or maybe a mixture of both. Either way, in real life she was most fun to meet and chatted with a handful of us at the stage door before Saturday’s matinée. I told her that sketching was one of my vices, and she said “it’s a vice you’re good at”.