Spanish Oranges, Alba Arikha’s twisty drama about artistic creation and the price of fame in married life, begins with a spiky encounter between a celebrated writer and the journalist interviewing her. The novelist, Fiona, gets twitchy when he starts recording and balks when he wonders if her fiction is autobiographical. She squirms and stalls until he ends up asking questions with his back turned, to make it less of an ordeal.
Things are not quite as overwrought on our video call when Arikha dials in from Paris. She is accompanied, on screen, by the actor Maryam d’Abo, who is starring in the play in London. So is D’Abo, like Fiona, deeply suspicious of journalists? “Of course,” she says in a friendly tone. Maybe I should turn my back as we talk. Or at least “some” journalists, she adds diplomatically, referring to her formative experience as a “Bond girl”. At the age of 26, she played Kara Milovy, a Czech cellist and would-be sniper who – typically – falls for the charms of Timothy Dalton’s 007 in The Living Daylights.
“I’ve never done so much press,” she recalls. “And in those days, there were the Fleet Street journalists who were harsher and more judgmental. You open your heart because you’re inexperienced – and then it’s edited so you think, ‘That’s not how I meant it.’”
She mostly loved the Bond experience, though. “It was like a big family,” she says, with producers Cubby and Barbara Broccoli very present. But she lived with a terror of being somehow exposed, in the aftermath. “I take responsibility for not having had enough confidence,” she explains. “I was quite shy. I hadn’t been a child actor. But I’m not blaming Bond for screwing up my career. I’ll never regret it.”
Both a producer and actor, D’Abo made a 2002 documentary, Bond Girls Are Forever, in which she spoke to women about their experiences on 007 films. “My pitch was Judi Dench. I said there is no story without her, because she becomes James Bond’s boss. I wanted to show how these roles had evolved and how they mirrored society – how they went from the 60s and villains like Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, in which there was a huge amount of tongue-in-cheek humour, to the 70s where Maud Adams is badly treated. It would be unthinkable now but there is that scene in The Man With the Golden Gun when Roger Moore smacks her in the face.” As the decades passed, women in the films became more empowered.
The only thing D’Abo might change, in hindsight, would be her decision to stay in Los Angeles when she might have built a theatre career in France. She is English but spent some of her childhood in Paris, speaking French as her first language. It is one of the affinities she found with Arikha, a friend of many decades who was born and brought up in Paris.
Arikha is better known as a novelist. Her first foray into professional playwriting was inspired by Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. “I love writing about dysfunctional families because of the complexities and all that’s unsaid. I love the idea of dissecting a couple but also the imbalance between one, the writer, who is on the brink of fame, and her husband, who is about to sink. So the seesaw of emotions, truth, fame and success – the hodge-podge of it all.”
In the play, Fiona has written a book using someone else’s story. Is this theft or a legitimate gathering of material? Her actor-husband, Ivo, has recently been cancelled after charges of violence against a woman. Are these fabricated or real? The play also asks what it takes from family life to be an artist, specifically for mothers.
Arikha grew up within a thoroughly artistic milieu, and you get the impression that she has thought deeply about these questions on artistic endeavour. She is the daughter of Romanian artist Avigdor Arikha and American poet Anne Atik. Samuel Beckett was her godfather and she would send him poems and plays she had written. She likes the mix of reality and fiction in art, and has interwoven them in her books. “I think life does inevitably come through in fiction, unconsciously sometimes.” When she wrote her memoir, Major/Minor, her sister said: “That never happened.” “I said: ‘It’s my truth’ and she said: ‘No it’s not. It didn’t happen.’ So what is truth?” There are some real-life parallels in the production of Spanish Oranges. Arikha’s 23-year-old daughter, Arianna Branca, is playing the daughter of the fictional couple.
Both D’Abo and Arikha know what it is to be married to fellow artists: the former to the late film-maker Hugh Hudson, the latter to the composer Tom Smail. Neither speak of experiencing the highly freighted artistic rivalry of the play. Does Arikha draw a line around what to take or leave out from real life based on ethics or privacy? Yes, for her novel Two Hours, which was a pared down version of a “pretty difficult moment in my life”.
As well as dissecting Fiona and Ivo’s marriage, Arikha pulls on several writerly conundrums around appropriation and identity politics. Both women are vehemently against the idea of only writing, or acting, from personal experience. “I remember Hugh had this wonderful project and Ed Harris was going to play this character who is gay,” says D’Abo. “The possible financiers said, ‘You have to get a gay actor.’ It was killing the whole artistic process for an actor and for a writer.”
Some people might say that this is a valid criticism based on representation and authenticity. “Of course, there has to be a healthy balance but it’s also about letting the creatives be free in bringing what is right for that particular storytelling and character,” says D’Abo.
Arikha agrees. “Without our imagination, what are we supposed to write about? As long as it’s done accurately and with empathy. Think of Tolstoy. How would he have written War and Peace? You have to use your imagination. You have to try and feel what it would be like to be someone else – or somewhere else.”
• Spanish Oranges is at the Playground theatre, London, from 11 February until 7 March
