don’t look at Jennifer SaundersShe will tell you on Twitter that she is not a fan of our current government, but she does have a preference when it comes to the next Tory leader and thus our Prime Minister. “I hope it is” Liz Trussfor comic reasons,” says the creator of Totally awesome and one half of sketch-comedy legends French and Saunders. “She’s just a really funny person. She has so many faces.”
Saunders, 64, talks to me via Zoom from her dressing room at Hammersmith’s In fact Apollowhere she plays the Mother Superior in Sister Act, the musical based on the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg movie. The show was set to take place in 2020, with Saunders’ longtime boyfriend Goldberg hiding her role as a gangster mole in a convent. But Covid changed everything and now she’s playing opposite singer Beverley Knight and a cast of stage musicians.
Saunders had previously only sung in French and Saunders spoofs and as the Fairy Godmother in Shrek 2, but her live technique is getting “better. At first I couldn’t keep up with the time and sang a tune that was only in my head. The band would start playing and one of us would finish first.”
Her first musical spans a four-year period during which she has split from TV, film and stadium comedy tours to what we might call ‘real’ theatre, first in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan for Kathy Burke (another friend) in 2018 , then in Coward’s Blithe Spirit for Richard Eyre before and between the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns.
Jennifer Saunders (right) with Lesley Joseph at the Sister Act the Musical afterparty
/ Dave BennettSaunders trained as a drama teacher at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where she met Dawn Frenchand wrote the script for the Spice Girls‘ ill-fated jukebox show Viva Forever. Had she always had a hankering for straight roles, or had the ambition to make a musical? “Not really,” she says, her standard answer to most questions.
“I was lucky enough to be asked. It came at a time when all the children were adults [she has three daughters with her husband of 37 years, Ade Edmondson] so you are not so housebound. I’m not driven at all and I never miss working, although Ade does: we always took jobs so that one of us was home. Now it’s a matter of feeling that you will be happy: I see no point in doing something at my age that will be an ordeal.”
Saunders’ life looks quite enviable, both professionally and personally. She has helped shape British humor since she and French joined the alternative comedy group the Comic Strip in the early 1980s, where she met Edmondson. Their long relationship (“the secret is not to talk about it,” he told me in 2016) is reflected in long-standing professional partnerships and friendships with French (they started a podcast, Titting About, in 2020) and Joanna Lumley, Patsy for her Edina in sitcom phenomenon Absolutely fantastic.
She and Edmondson split their time between London and Dartmoor and are avid grandparents of five grandchildren aged between nine and four months, courtesy of their eldest daughters Ella and Beattie. “It gives you more life because you’re doing all the young things again, jumping in the sea and messing around, although it’s more exhausting than I ever imagined,” she says. The youngest daughter Freya joined them in lockdown in Devon, where Saunders’ own mother died last November.
“To be honest, it wasn’t too grim,” she says. “It was her time and she was ready to go. She’d had a few strokes and slowly slowed down, but she wasn’t bedridden for too long and we were all together so my brother and I could do much of the care for her. Saunders’ pilot father died of cancer a few years ago, and in 2010 she also suffered from breast cancer, but this is one of the many things she doesn’t want to make a fuss about.
And unlike many comedic greats, she hasn’t gone sour with age. She continues to praise the BBC, which supported French and Saunders and Ab Fab. And she has no time for those who argue that culture canceling or (terrible term) “wokeness” comedy kills.
“I don’t think so,” she says firmly. “Perhaps the fear of [being cancelled] has stopped someone from trying someone else, but maybe that’s a good thing. When I look back at some of the things we’ve done, I think we were terribly mean. Now we are old and [have become] the established order. So let ‘wokeness’ take over and see what happens. If you think of it as kindness, or if you think about who could hurt you, that’s a good thing.” And with that, she signs off to don her Sister Act costume. Our interview doesn’t end with a bang, but a wimp.
Sister Act runs through August 1 at the Eventim Apollo; buy tickets here