My Life: Gillian Bevan

Gillian is starring as pie-baking, fly-swatting Mrs Nellie Lovett in the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, directed by James Brining. It transfers to Manchester in November, which means daytime is spent in rehearsal for the Royal Exchange stage.

“It’s very hectic at the moment,” Gillian says. “We are all a bit tired, but it’s exciting as well.”

The cast lighten the savage mood by trooping out to the market to buy healthy trays of salad to share.

“The whole production is set inside a lunatic asylum,” Gillian says. “It’s usually done in a Victorian setting, but he’s updated it to the 1980s. When she starts making all the pies, she becomes a bit more upwardly mobile, which is very reminiscent of the Eighties.

“It’s one of the great parts for women, so I feel very thrilled and privileged to be playing it.”

Gillian first played Sondheim in the 1980s’ West End production of Follies, as Diana Rigg’s younger self. “I learned enormous amounts from her about stage technique,” she says.

She has also appeared in Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, and last year in Road Show. “They are so rewarding to do, so unlike any other musicals. They’re thought-provoking and yet they’ve got great lyrics and great soaring melodies.”

A career highlight came in 2010 when she sang for Stephen Sondheim at his 80th birthday celebrations. “I wouldn’t have missed that for the world,” she says.

Her TV career has included playing the head in Channel 4’s Teachers but, for fans of BBC’s Holby City, Gillian will always be Gina, wife of Dr Elliot Hope. Gina suffered from Motor Neurone Disease and ended her days in a Swiss assisted dying clinic, a performance which won her critical acclaim.

“They were great scripts and it was a bit of a water cooler moment,” she says. “I know that sometimes those sort of dramas and soaps are frowned upon, but then they take a cause like that, and it does an enormous amount of social good, I think, just in terms of getting the nation talking about those kind of issues, so I was really proud to be part of that.”

Six years after she left Holby, her photograph remains. “I’m good friends with Paul Bradley, who plays Elliot, and he says any time a new director comes in, there’s a tradition, when they are filming in his office, to have to start on my photograph on his desk, and pan out ...

“It’s now become a thing that my friends have all spotted,” she laughs.

Stockport-born Gillian, who recently completed an 18-month run in Billy Elliot, has a son, Jack, 19, who has just started a degree in circus skills, much to mum’s delight. “Nowadays that sort of physical theatre is very much to the fore, with productions like War Horse, where there’s puppeteering, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Barnum.”

While in Leeds, she is staying in a tiny flat near the theatre. “It’s like living in a Japanese pod or a rather swanky caravan,” she says, adding that she thinks of Yorkshire as her second home, as she has worked in the county so much, in Salad Days at Harrogate Theatre, in Blood Brothers in York, and three seasons with Alan Ayckbourn in Scarborough.

“I must have been a Yorkshire girl in another life,” she says.

The making of Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is currently running at the Quarry Stage of the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds.

Marking James Brining’s debut as artistic director, it’s a joint production with the Manchester Royal Exchange and transfers there on November 1.

Meanwhile it runs at the West Yorkshire Playhouse until October 26, with pre-show workshops for families (children 12+) on October 19 and 26 at 12 noon.