Christine Fox, author of Fine Dining

STAGE-STRUCK from early childhood, Christine Fox had her teenage ambition to go to drama school quashed by her father. But now, in her 70s, Christine, from Belsize Park, is about to fulfil a thespian dream.

Not only has she written two short plays soon to be performed at the Canal Café Theatre, Little Venice, but she will also take a lead role in one of them.

The plays, titled Fine Dining, and Boar Intent, are short absurdist comedies, and Christine told Review: “I laughed all the way through writing them. I didn’t set out to write in that genre, but it came out of the time of Covid and Brexit. Perhaps creating one’s own reality is a relief when reality is daunting. It was escapism.”

She plays the Maitre D’ in Fine Dining, which is set in a small, meticulously arranged and – as its sole customer says – “very strange” restaurant.

Christine’s role includes a quick “vigorous tangoish dance” with the chef past the bemused customer.
Restaurant specialities are Hull roast beef, Rotherham vegetarian main, Pontefract potatoes,

Yorkshire Parkin and Holy Island custard – the hot custard being a favourite of 7th century St Cuthbert.

There are just three characters and the script is inventive, funny and promises plenty of laughs from an audience.

In Boar Intent an earnest professor advises on how campers can deter wild boar, which are “spreading like wildfire” in the Home Counties.

There’s a bizarre, comical carry-on over construction of a tent with “boar-spotting holes”, and discussion of strategies and defence methods.

Fine Dining

Describing her early hopes, Christine, who grew up in a Surrey village, said: “I wanted to act from the age of four.”

She took leading roles in school plays, but after her A-levels her father wanted her to go to university and he refused to support her quest to go to drama school.

“Going on stage wasn’t considered a real job.”

After moving to London, where she thought all actors lived, she trained as a BBC secretary and worked in the Overseas Service at Bush House for a while.

Later she studied for a degree, becoming an English teacher, first at Hampstead Comprehensive and then at Parliament Hill School.

“I loved teaching,” she said, but she always wrote and acted in her spare time.

She has a daughter, who is now a businesswoman.

A course Christine took at the Central School of Speech and Drama led to her writing black comedy Divided Soul, which was performed at the Canal Café Theatre in 1987.

Later she returned to Central to study for a Master’s in Advanced Theatre Practice and following her studies taught drama to children excluded from school.

Before Covid she acted the part of the Woman in Samuel Beckett’s play Rockaby at Questors Theatre, Ealing.

Her writing continues unabated, with a play about author Charlotte Brontë now completed.

Christine researched the novelist at the British Library, where she examined four letters, preserved under glass, Charlotte wrote to a professor she fell in love with in Brussels.

The play explores Charlotte’s unrequited love for the teacher, and her struggles to be published as a writer in early Victorian England. It centres on her masterpiece novel, Villette.

Yet another play – an adaptation of a story by Colette – is in the offing.

Christine also writes poetry, and read one of her poems, River Life, on BBC Radio 4 during lockdown.

But acting is her passion.

“When I’m acting I am transformed. I adore it,” she said.

The other cast for the absurdist comedies are: Zac Benoir, Bianca Curacao, Tony Sears and Simon Taylor and the director is George Savona.

• Boar Intent and Fine Dining, Canal Café Theatre, Little Venice from Nov 1-4. Details at canalcafetheatre.com/