Introducing... The Cello & The Nightingale, the actress, the director & the world premiere at York Theatre Royal.

The world premiere of Patricia Cleveland Peck's biographical account of the eventful life of cellist Beatrice Harrison, the Jacqueline Du Pre of the 1920s, opens at York Theatre Royal next week. Charles Hutchinson talks to actress Brigit Forsyth and director Susan Stern about the play's long gestation period and the magic of the cello.

Beatrice Harrison never married. Instead her cello was her soul mate, keeping her alive yet torturing her soul. Brigit, what is your relationship with your cello?

"I come from a musical Edinburgh family; we all played and sang, three pianists and two violinists. My younger brother played violin and I would like to have played the violin too, but no one played the cello, so that fell to me. I'd already had piano lessons and I was nine when I first started to learn the cello."

What happened? Was it love at first sight?

"I remember getting a laugh at the first concert I played when I hitched up this beautiful brocade dress in order to sit down. They laughed, and I thought it's all right for you but how else am I supposed to play?

"I survived, and I played cello until I was 17, and although I didn't get into the National Youth Orchestra, I did play with a string orchestra in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, and I remember playing a lot of chamber music. Meanwhile, my father suggested I should train as a secretary."

Your cello then lay dormant for 20 years. How come?

"I went to RADA the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and I gave up the cello immediately but I did end up playing double bass in Shut Up And Sing, the show in which Tom Courtenay was discovered."

What made your reactivate your musical gifts?

"I picked up the cello again because my aunt left me rather a nice cello that I had re-strung and re-bridged and it sounded better than my old one, and I thought 'I should play this'."

Four years ago, your cello teacher, Hall Orchestra player Dale Culliford, introduced you to a book that was to lead to The Cello & The Nightingale.

"Out of the blue Dale gave me the autobiography of Beatrice Harrison, featuring all the letters she had written on tour, edited by Patricia Cleveland Peck. To be honest I wasn't too keen on it: I couldn't imagine how a drama could emerge because it didn't have real drama as a book.

"I thought no one would be interested, I didn't play that well but I still tried to follow it through, and approached one writer, who wasn't interested. Then I was featured in the Radio Times when I was doing Playing The Fields and I said I wanted to do a stage project about Beatrice Harrison and the story of more than a million people worldwide hearing her duet with the nightingales one hot summer night in her Surrey garden in the first BBC outside broadcast in 1924."

Did anyone respond?

"I got eight extraordinary letters from nightingale enthusiasts and a very fine, enthusiastic letter from Patricia saying she was delighted I wanted to do this project because she knew everything about Beatrice and her sisters.

"I didn't want to do a one-woman show so she wrote a play for two roles, Beatrice and a psychiatrist. Leicester Haymarket said they would do it, but then there was a strike there and I thought it was destiny it would never be done, but from the minute it was written, I started playing cello every day, taking it everywhere with me, last summer in Regent's Park when I was doing High Society, then on tour with Hayley Mills in a play called Humble Boy. My choice of digs would depend on whether they minded me playing!

"Meanwhile, Susan rang me out of the blue and said she would like to direct the play. I didn't know she had the script or that she was a director, because I knew her as a voice coach - a marvellous voice coach - we worked together when I played Gertrude at the West Yorkshire Playhouse."

Susan, how did you progress the project from page to stage?

"Each day at the Playhouse, I would arrive and Brigit would be playing her cello. The news came through that Leicester was not going to do it, and I was recounting this story to Damian York Theatre Royal artistic director Damian Cruden, when he suddenly said 'Oh, I've just received that script'.

"Damian gave the thumbs-up a year ago, and it was decided with Patricia that it should be re-written as a play about the four Harrison sisters, with Beatrice looking back on her life, with her cello by her side. Now it's much more of a concerto, a musical poem, a more abstract memory play."

Brigit, you will play your cello in the intimate space of The Studio. Are you nervous?

"Rehearsing this show has already taken me to a place I've never been before, playing the cello as Beatrice would play it, but it's doing my head in just playing it as Brigit. I haven't got near to Beatrice yet, but once I do..."

The Cello & The Nightingale will run from May 14 to June 5 in The Studio, York Theatre Royal. Tickets: £9, £8, students and under 25s, £3.50; ring 01904 623568.

Updated: 09:50 Friday, May 07, 2004