Doon But Not Out

"It’s about death, leukaemia and divorce," says Doon MacKichan matter-of-factly. It’s not a sentence you expect to hear from an actress best known for specialising in nonsense: in the all-woman sketch show Smack The Pony, and as Collaterlie Sisters, the straight-faced economics correspondent who read out daft market updates on The Day Today. So you might think her work has taken a serious turn with her stage show Prima Doona, premiering at the Fringe this year.

In fact, MacKichan is no stranger to straight theatre. Her theatre CV is at least as varied as her comedy one, if not quite as high-profile. Her last trip to Edinburgh—back in 1996—was a straight adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, which she penned with Martin Miller, a "dry, dour" Scottish author who also helped out with the drafting of the new show.

MacKichan's first trips to Edinburgh came with her Manchester University drama group in the early '80s. In honeyed English vowels that betray no hint of her Scottish heritage, she tells me that her most vivid memory of this is having to "sleep in a toilet, with a pink tap and a nice smell of bleach."

An even more hectic Festival in 1986 saw her doing three shows a day and bunking up with Hugh Grant. "There were loads of different theatre groups staying in one house" including Grant's short-lived Oxbridge sketch group The Jockeys of Norfolk, and inevitably "everyone started shagging everyone else. So Hugh and I ended up in the top room, but nothing went on, can you believe it?!", she laughs. "I'd roll in at one o'clock after having done a cabaret show... too tired for Hugh Grant – what kind of an idiot?"

MacKichan claims she had no great ambitions for a career in either acting or comedy until quite late on. But she was caught up in the excitement of a time when "comedy was becoming the new rock'n'roll" both in Edinburgh and on the emerging alternative comedy scene in London. "There was a lot of experimentation, and ability to fail" she recalls fondly. "It wasn't the kind of 'All Bar One' comedy that you get now... you'd go into a pub and literally have a piece of paper that you'd written that morning, and perform it."

In this spirit, MacKichan used to go on at comedy nights performing short character monologues. She found herself sharing the stage with the likes of Kevin Eldon, Julia Davis and Mark Heap – "all comic geniuses, I think" and the clique who would later help to reinvent British TV comedy in the mid-90s with shows like Big Train and I'm Alan Partridge. MacKichan's own break into the media came in the form of On The Hour, the spoof radio news show that prefigured The Day Today; and later came Smack The Pony, a real landmark for women in British comedy.

"What was great about Smack was that the straight person could become the funny person," she explains. Rather than being consigned to playing straight foils for more amusing male characters, "we were able to play around with that idea. When it's just two women in a sketch, you can say 'okay, this time I'll be the lead and you be the feed.' And that was respected because it was our show. So yes, it was delightful. Very liberating."

All the while, MacKichan was treading the boards in serious and comic productions alike, winning favourable reviews for supporting roles in productions of Mother Courage at the National Theatre and A Respectable Wedding at the Young Vic.

But her new Fringe show is a departure. Prima Doona is a piece wrenched from MacKichan's psyche after a very gruelling three years during which "loads of shit happened at once." She keeps fairly tight-lipped about the exact details, but allows me to say that "the obsessive thing that dominated our family life" at that time was her son falling ill with acute myloid leukaemia, a cancer of the blood that saw MacKichan in and out of hospital and desperately fearing her child's death.

"It was a three-year period of my life that was basically frying pan-in-the-face time," she says. "I was just ambling along with the same old grouches and gripes that we all have, and suddenly it was the big, big one, the thing that everybody fears most, which is their kid dying. It's telling that story just before it and just after it."

The title comes from a nickname MacKichan gives herself, due to her tendency to be a "selfish, up-my-own-arse actress," working herself up into a state about relatively petty problems. The three years of heartache forced her to reconsider her priorities, she says. "It's that interesting thing of rewinding once you've had that experience, and going 'My God, that's really funny that I gave a toss about that.'''

It's a story that MacKichan felt she had to tell: "I didn't know whether to write it as a book, or something I would read on the radio, or as a sitcom or something like that." Eventually though, the stage seemed the best option. "I wanted to make it quite dark and funny, and also very physical... I do fling myself around a lot in it."

The result sounds like the kind of undefinable beast that Edinburgh can be so good for: an honest, comic confessional addressed to the audience, not standup and not quite theatre. "I don't really know what it should be billed as," she admits. "I know there's a lot of people coming, and all the hype, but I don't quite know what it's going to be like yet. I won't know till I'm there, which is quite scary – but that's how it should be."