‘I’m in my early 20s most of the time… totally up for it!’: Tamsin Greig on ageing, caring and learning bass guitar

Not many interviews begin with your subject telling you, gently and warmly, how they’ve mastered being unapproachable. But here is Tamsin Greig, on Zoom in the Donmar Warehouse’s rehearsal rooms, telling me how this behaviour begins as soon as she’s left the house every morning.

“I get up at 6.30 to walk the dog so that I can get out and be in the air to start turning my words over in my head. People who see me know not to come near me because I’m always muttering to myself.” Then she gets the tube (“a good place to learn my lines”), but admits she gets recognised – unsurprisingly, given her classic roles in so many shows, from Black Books to Green Wing, Episodes to Friday Night Dinner. “But when I’m not speaking I have quite an angry face” – she raises her eyebrows slightly, impishly, as she says this – “which I use to my advantage.”

This has been Greig’s recent routine ahead of co-starring in a radical new play, Backstroke, which opens next weekend at the Donmar. She plays Bo, a woman dealing with work, a struggling daughter and the aftermath of her force-of-nature mother, Beth, having a stroke. Beth is played by fellow TV-to-stage veteran Celia Imrie. “Obviously, Celia thinks it’s incredibly rude that she’s been cast as my mother, but that’s fair enough because she is eternally youthful,” Greig points out (Imrie is 72 to Greig’s 58).

Then comes her London run in Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, which transfers to the Theatre Royal Haymarket from an acclaimed run in Bath last summer (one critic said she “brilliantly conveys a woman calcified by misery”, another that she was “made for wit”). Then – keep up – she also stars in Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright’s new show for the BBC, Riot Women, about five middle-aged women forming a punk band, showing later this year. She plays Holly Gaskell, a retiring police officer who turns out to be “rubbish at the bass but good at being in a band”.

Greig had to learn to play the instrument for it. How was that? She grins, a little proudly. “Well, I actually had to act a bit more rubbish than I’ve become.” She tried to channel Joan Armatrading, and … and … she struggles for a name. “Come on, brain! What’s her name? She’s so famous!” The name arrives delicately on her tongue. “Chrissie Hynde. Honestly. How difficult was it to remember that name when it was so easy to picture her? It’ll be interesting to see if any of my lines come out of my mouth at the Donmar … ”

Backstroke is another female-dominated production for Greig, with five women on stage and an all-female stage management team (“very, very unusual, and very lovely”). It’s influenced by elements of the life of its writer-director, Anna Mackmin, who was brought up in a commune by a formidable woman and with whom she had no clearly defined parent-child relationship. “I’m dealing with a human being who’s very complex and wounded and an incredibly adept survivor,” Greig says. “From the age of five, she had to develop a means of engaging with the world where she is fully alive but also had to learn to be her own bodyguard.”

The play spans the characters’ whole lives, including how memory suddenly intrudes in tough times, mixing in filmed sequences behind the actors, which occasionally interact with the script. Greig and Imrie play mother and daughter at different ages without costume or makeup – which means Greig has to act as a child. How does that work? “What we’re discovering is the more I use my voice but just remain faithful to the words that Anna has written, the truer the character is. At one point someone asks, ‘How old are you?’ And Bo says” – her voice goes softer, more precise – “‘I’m pretty close to being six.’ Just through the words, I’m that little girl.”

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Greig’s childhood was not particularly privileged. Her father, Eric, who was 60 when she was born, was a stay-at-home dad (Greig said in a 2012 Observer Food Monthly interview that he was “never able to show affection emotionally or physically”, although he did bring her liquidised coq au vin to the hospital when she was seven, in an isolation ward with glandular fever). Her mother, Ann, worked as a secretary, and at one point the family went bankrupt, living in what Greig once called “a shithole” in Kilburn, north-west London. Still, Greig loved being the middle of three sisters (Dorcas is older, Abigail younger) all born a year apart (“My goodness, we had fun”).

She encountered Celia Imrie for the first time with her mother, watching Imrie playing overdramatic shop owner Miss Babs in Victoria Wood’s Acorn Antiques. “My mum was born in Leeds but left as a teenager,” Greig says, “and then sort of transformed herself into somebody very posh and left behind her working-class roots. So when she watched things like Victoria Wood, you could see that she was smelling a different aroma. There was something there about her memories that I didn’t have access to.”

Greig’s parents died before she was a household name – her mother in 2001, when Greig was filming the second series of Black Books, and her eldest children (of three) were two and one (“it was a very testing time”). Greig is aware that many people of her age are squeezed between caring for elderly parents and their growing children. “And I am very glad, in a way, that I was able to be there to offer the care that I was able to give in my 30s, because so much is required of you, of your heart and your physicality and your mental agility.” She’s passionate about end-of-life care. “We can’t be a fully rounded society without it.”

But back to Imrie. She and Greig first crossed paths in real life when they starred in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel alongside Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Penelope Wilton, staying in the same “monstrously beautiful hotels – I just basically jumped on the tails of the dames”. Imrie prepared a welcome party for Greig’s family (Greig’s husband, actor Richard Leaf, to whom she’s been married since 1997, and their children) who were due to arrive for a visit while Greig was shooting her scenes. “She couldn’t bear the idea that they were all turning up and I wouldn’t be there to greet them, including my children, who were quite little then. I was so moved by her doing that. But that’s who she is.”

We talk about other things in our lively 40 minutes: how much Greig loved Nick Cave’s recent Desert Island Discs (“I’m a real fan … he sees performing as a kind of communion with people … I feel like that with the theatre”) and how some children seem frozen at younger ages since the pandemic, while others grew up fast. What age do you feel? “I’m in my early 20s most of the time. Like, you know, totally up for it! Then I realise, of course, that after lunch I have to have a nanna nap. I mean, literally. At the Donmar, they’ve had to make sure that there is a room available at lunchtime for me to go and lie down.”

Snoozing aside, Greig strikes me as a potential dame, given her stage and theatre credits to date and what’s to come. What does she still wish for? “To do a show on Broadway – which I’ve come close to a few times – and to let my face be the age that it is.” She loved watching Harriet Walter as Thatcher in the recent Brian and Maggie, she says. “To look at an actor and think, ‘You are so brilliant at what you do, and your face has got so many stories in it.’ To see the life! Maybe that’s my ambition, just to keep on getting older and older, challenging the industry to keep on employing me.”

• Backstroke is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2, from 15 February to 12 April