Back in 1984, if you recognised the name of any member of the three-part Knightley family, of Teddington, southwest London, it would probably be that of Sharman Macdonald. Her husband Will was carving out a niche as a stage actor, little Caleb was playing with Lego. Sharman, however, had just been named most promising playwright at the Evening Standard awards. Her play, When I Was A Girl I Used To Scream And Shout, had established her as one of Scotland’s most authentic and individual voices.
“I had a bet with my husband,” she tells me now, looking out of the cafe window onto London’s theatreland. “If I sold a script, then we could have a second child. I wanted the child, you see. Well, we both did. But he wanted the money to have the child.”
The play was sold, and nine months later — “eight months, actually, she was an eight-month baby” — the Knightleys were four. Along came Keira, the star of Pirates of the Caribbean, King Arthur, and countless others, no doubt, to come. Today she is the family member whose name anybody in the western world is likely to recognise.
This does not mean that her mother has retired to live in reflected glory. Next month Sharman Macdonald’s new play, The Girl With Red Hair, opens at Edinburgh’s Lyceum. Set, like most of her work, in small-town Scotland, it deals with a family and a community, ripped apart by the death of a teenage girl.
“Scottish is the only thing I can do,” she says earnestly, looking out at the metropolitan bustle that is now her home. “I am perfectly capable of writing in other voices. But when I get asked to write whatever I want, then it’s often — if not always — Scotland. What I hear comes out in Scottish rhythms. I can’t tell you why.”
Although she looks a good decade younger, Sharman Macdonald is 53. She is wearing a brown pullover and short black skirt, her long nails are unpainted. Long grey-black hair hangs girlishly over one eye. It is clear where Keira gets her looks. Her voice, with obvious Scottish inflections, is soft and equally youthful. Later, listening to my tape, I could have been interviewing a teenager.
Macdonald’s last stage outing was 1999’s After Juliet, an imagined sequel to Romeo and Juliet, commissioned by the National Theatre as part of a youth theatre scheme. “I’m not sure why it has been so long,” she muses. “It’s just the way things have panned out. I’ve been writing . . . screenplays that will be done, haven’t been done yet, or will never be done.” She has also written another play, Broken Hallelujah, to be performed in San Francisco, about the American civil war. “That’s not Scottish!” Macdonald was born in Glasgow, in 1951. Her father was an electrical engineer; his work took the family to Stevenson in Ayrshire, to a power plant, and finally to Edinburgh, when Sharman was in her early teens. Her mother worked as a secretary at Edinburgh University. Sharman attended Hutchesons’ Girls Grammar in Glasgow, then George Watson’s College in Edinburgh and, throughout her childhood, nursed dreams of being an actress.
“It was my grandparents,” she says. “My father’s mother and father. He was an actor’s manager, and she was a Tiller girl. They’d been long dead by the time I was born, but I think stories of that family entranced me. The glorious and the terrible. Starvation and riches. I think that’s what drew me in. My parents were very much against it.”
So she ended up at Edinburgh University, reading English. “Although I didn’t actually read very much,” she admits. “That’s what you did, then, if you wanted to do drama. You applied for whatever, and then spent all your time with Dramsoc.” Today, Macdonald claims to have no recollection of which writers she studied. She seems a little bewildered by the question. “I got the worst degree in the world. An ordinary. No example to the children.”
It was at university that she met her husband, the actor Will Knightley, when he stayed in her flat. “I thought he was a girl at first,” she remembers. “One of the girls in the flat had written a play and asked if — I thought she said Wilhelmina — could stay. And I said, of course. Then I walked into the kitchen one morning, having not been in the flat for a while, and saw this guy standing at the sink, with his jeans on, and a bare top, and long blond hair. And I thought, oh. Not Wilhelmina. But a bit gorgeous.”
The pair became a couple pretty swiftly and went on to act together several times. After about 12 years on the stage, however, the young actress decided she’d had enough. “I didn’t enjoy it any more,” she says. “It was stage fright. It just got worse and worse, until finally I just thought, no more! Forget it!” Macdonald had always written. “Poems when I’d forgotten people’s birthdays, that sort of thing. They’d say, ‘This is the most valuable thing you could have given me’ and I’d feel terribly guilty.” A part in a woeful television series, the name consigned to history, gave her the courage to try writing dialogue.
The first act of When I Was A Girl . . . was reworked 14 or 15 times. “Each time I showed it to my husband, and each time he said no, write it again.” So she did. Eventually, it was good enough for London’s Bush theatre and went on to win her that most promising playwright award. Having won the bet with her husband, she went on to have Keira.
Today, Sharman Macdonald will talk about her famous daughter a little, but with the tape recorder turned off. This is inevitable when even the smallest comments will be devoured by the gossip columns. She’s far more comfortable talking about Caleb, a trainee studio manager for BBC radio. “I’m hugely proud of both of my children. Obviously, when I’m in their worlds, I’m seen as their mother. I was Mrs Knightley in school and Sharman Macdonald when I work on my own.”
When I Was A Girl . . . was followed by a wealth of other plays, including The Brave, All Things Nice, After Juliet, and The Winter Guest, which was commissioned and directed by the actor Alan Rickman (a close friend) and turned into a film starring Emma Thompson. Macdonald has also written two novels, of which, modestly, she is now rather disparaging.
It was not always easy, she admits, bringing up children as one half of a creative, sporadically employed couple. “You need the money,” she says. “Any family does. Unless you’re on a high and creating well, there simply isn’t going to be the money to get round Sainsbury’s. The kids, obviously, are more important than the writing. Yet you need the writing in order to feed the kids, so the balance is rather hard to achieve. I think I always erred in favour of the kids.” Had she the early part of her career again, she says, she’d write far more.
The Girl With Red Hair will transfer to London after its stint at the Lyceum, and the whole process is something about which Macdonald is hugely excited. She’s also looking forward to spending some time in Scotland, and getting to know Edinburgh again. Her last trip north was to Glasgow last year, while Keira was shooting The Jacket. “I went up twice to stay with her. I had an absolute ball. We went out to this club, Nice ’n’ Sleazy, where people just got up and sang.
” Not many 53-year-olds can describe a night out at a grungy rock bar with such relish. “And walking around Glasgow, it’s so beautiful. Everybody is so friendly. When I was a child it was all a little frightening, but it has changed so much. I can’t wait to get to know Edinburgh again, because it’s years since I’ve been there, too.”
With the interview over, Macdonald breathes a sigh of relief, and spotting cigarettes in my bag, gleefully pinches one. She recently started smoking again after 20 years, she tells me, and she’s become a terrible thief. She’s even started sneaking into Keira’s flat, because she knows in which drawer to find her rolling tobacco.
My hands hover over my notepad. Macdonald lights up. Please let me write that down. “Och, go on then.”
