Outnumbered star relishes her Chichester Festival Theatre debut... at last!

Outnumbered star Claire Skinner was supposed to make her Chichester Festival Theatre debut in the spring season of 2021 which had to be cancelled before it was even announced. But now both Claire and The Narcissist finally coincide for a late-summer run in the Minerva (August 26-September 24).

The piece promises a gripping and witty take on personal and political communication in the internet age. Everyone needs Jim. His mother. His best friend. His brother. His new lover. A hopeful future president. But can Jim really help anyone when he isn’t sure who he is any more or what he actually believes? Into his life comes the Senator, played by Claire.

“It’s quite an extraordinary piece really. It is set in America and is set in 2017 and people are just regrouping after the shock of Hillary Clinton losing and Donald Trump winning. We've spoken to quite a lot of Americans and American commentators and they all talk about the trauma psychologically of Trump winning that election. They all saw it as a done deal for Hillary and they just had to row back, just trying to understand how it was that Trump won, how nobody had properly taken into account the great passion that Trump supporters had for him, the people that would be reading his tweets all night long. People had just not realised how disillusioned people were. The bankers had been baled out and the bankers had gone back to normal and people were now really wanting change and that's how this happened.”

Now we are a couple years further down the line, there is an extra layer: “And I think it is still good for us to see what happens when we get complacent, that we really do have to take into account the people that feel left behind and that we have to look after those people.”

Claire wasn’t due to be in the 2020 production of the play which hadn’t been cast when it was pulled months ahead of its originally planned opening date, but she was supposed to be in Chichester in the spring of last year alongside her partner and Outnumbered co-star Hugh Dennis in Michael Frayn’s Benefactors.

“We were thinking that it would be a really nice celebration of theatres being back, but we just weren’t able to do it. And it is not going to happen now because Hugh just gets so booked up in advance. There just wasn't a chance to make it work.”

Which means that the last time she was on stage was in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg at the Trafalgar Studios in 2019: “And then we had the lockdowns. I was with my family and with my extended family and we started doing lots of clearing out. And when the dumps – I mean the waste recycling centres! – opened we made about 14 different trips in Hugh’s mini. It was a proper clear-out, and it good for the soul. The house has gone from Edwardian and quite dark to very bright and white. I've always had that tendency to clear out. We've got between us four grown-up children and there's a lot of stuff to get through!”