Wisdom of Pearl

Feb 5 2003 By Val Javin, The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Juliette Kaplan as Pearl

She's been playing Last of The Summer Wine battleaxe Pearl for over 20 years. And now Juliette Kaplan is bringing her small-screen alter ego to the stage in Huddersfield. She told VAL JAVIN all about it.

John Hobbs, famed for Butterflies and It Ain't Half Hot Mum and many other hit shows, will direct.

"I'm a very lucky lady," says Juliette. "I think it's one of the best pieces I've ever read. It's the whole of humanity - taking this woman who is a battleaxe and showing another side to her.

"That gives me scope as an actress and rounds the character off. I'm delighted with it."

Juliette is keen to do the show here in Huddersfield, part of a region she feels very much at home in. "Well I spend about six months of the year here."

There's a rightness about it which pleases this skilled comedy actress. It continues a pattern set by what happened when she first played the character with which she is now so firmly associated.

Juliette, who these days lives in Westgate-on-Sea, first played the strait-laced character in a stage version of the TV comedy hit back in the Eighties.

"The character was called Pearl, which was my mother's name, and the show was in Bournemouth, which is my home town. Life is strange, but you just have to go with it sometimes."

And these days, it seems, Juliette has decided to follow that advice even more.

"I'm 60 now. I've grown up. I thought, what can anybody do to me now? It's so liberating."

As Mr Clarke well knows. It was that new mood of liberation that made Juliette pick up the phone and make the call which has given her her very own, one-woman show. And she couldn't be more excited.

* See another side of one of your TV comedy favourites in Just Pearl at the LBT's Cellar Theatre on March 27.