Interview with Joanna Vanderham (Flora)
An interview with Joanna Vanderham, who plays Flora
Published: 20 July 2017
Who will it appeal to? Everyone - it's a love story. A complicated, beautifully written, engaging, through-the-ages story about complicated love
What made you want to be a part of Man In An Orange Shirt?
The writing: I wanted to play Flora and tell this intimate, desperately painful love story. The subtext in Patrick's script meant we knew he trusted us to convey his intentions without having to say much at all - what a glorious challenge as an actor! Also the chance to work with Michael Samuels the director; I loved Any Human Heart.
Describe Flora to us. Where do we meet her at the start of the story?
Flora, to me, was so full of life, she was brimming with hope after the war. But sadly her light is dimmed by living a lie and living without love. The beauty of the piece is in the subtext, the things unsaid. She is a woman who has to develop such a thick skin to get by in life, it makes one ask, is fitting into society really what life is about? I think most people can relate to being in love with the wrong person.
Did you do any research ahead of filming?
I did quite a lot of research into attitudes towards homosexual men at the time, it's an interesting but disheartening period of our social history, mainly fuelled by ignorance and shame. Flora is also pregnant in a few of the scenes and so I did a lot of research into what contractions feel like (as well as watching an episode of One Born Every Minute...!)
What was it like working with Oliver? You have some pretty intense scenes together.
I think Oli is a fantastic actor and he brought so much detail and sensitivity to the role. We got on really well and the trust we had in each other meant that the scenes that had the potential to be awkward (the sex scene in which my character loses her virginity, for example...!) were only as awkward as they needed to be for the story!
We found that because the characters rarely said aloud how they felt - again the glorious subtext in the writing - that we would go home feeling like we had more to give or say or do, but we would reassure each other and carry on the next day. It was a short shoot but we both said we felt like we carried the characters around for weeks afterwards, they were hard to leave behind. So I was grateful to have Oli to share that with. Filming is a unique experience in that way, as only the people involved really understand.
Who do you feel Man in an Orange Shirt would appeal to?
Everyone - it's a love story. A complicated, beautifully written, engaging, through-the-ages story about complicated love.
Complete the sentence: Man In An Orange Shirt is…
The best thing you'll see on TV in 2017.
An introduction, by Patrick Gale
My commission to write this show couldn’t have been more fortuitous: Commissioning Editor Lucy Richer let it be known she was after a script reflecting gay male experience in the 20th century, which ideally would have the flavour of a Patrick Gale novel.
Happily she said this to Kudos’s Sue Swift, who just happened to be an old friend from my days of bridge addiction. With such a vast subject, I had to find an involving, intimate story within it and, as with so many of my novels, this was a fragment of narrative from my own life.
When my mother was pregnant with me and preparing for us to move - from Camp Hill Prison on the Isle of Wight to Wandsworth, where my father was to become governor - she found a stash of personal letters hidden in his desk. At first she was amused, assuming they were from an old girlfriend he’d never mentioned, then horrified, as she realised they were from an old school and university friend who had been his best man.
In real life she destroyed the letters, terrified he’d be arrested for what was then an imprisonable offence but also disgusted because, in her ignorance, she assumed this meant he was a paedophile. In true buttoned-up English fashion, she never let him know what she had discovered.
What I’ve done in Man In An Orange Shirt is to take that scene of discovery and wind backwards, imagining the two men’s impossible love for each other being shipwrecked on the demands of respectability and the law. And then I’ve wound forwards from it, imagining what would have happened if my mother had instead confronted my father with the discovery. Readers of my novels will know I’m a psychotherapist manqué, fascinated by the effects of secrets and lies within a family.
Man In An Orange Shirt takes those secrets and lies and imagines the long-range damage they might do if the understandably embittered wife of episode one went on, in episode two, to find that her grandson was yearning for the fulfilment her late husband had never known.
Although it’s brilliant that transmission will coincide with the BBC’s celebration of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, I hope this is much more than just a drama about gay men and their difficulties.
I hope that its two love stories will touch people simply as love stories, and that the torments and frustrations in the family I portray will set viewers wondering about their own ancestors, grandparents and parents - and what secrets and lies they might be concealing.
GK
