More than a mobile face

Siobhan Redmond has her tight black mac and pink chair to thank for her latest film role - and her character isn't even one of the oddballs. Geoffrey Macnab reports Siobhan Redmond turned up to her first audition for Beautiful People, which closes the Edinburgh Film Festival tonight, wearing a tight-fitting, black, plastic mackintosh. She arrived at the second one carrying a chair.

"I didn't have any option," she pleads in mitigation of what seems like extreme eccentricity. "It was one of those situations where I saw it in the shop window and thought 'I must have that chair'. It's pink and it has got raspberries on it."

The combination of pink furniture and shiny black plastic tickled the imagination of Bosnian-born writer-director Jasmin Dizdar. "They confirmed him in the opinion that I was off my head, and therefore should be given this part," Redmond suggests.

We're in her dressing room backstage at London's Vaudeville Theatre, where Redmond is appearing in Liz Lochhead's hit play, Perfect Days. Outside the theatre, her name is in lights above the title, something which makes her blush and squirm in embarrassment. "It would be nice if Liz's name was up there too, after all, it's her play. It makes me feel a combination of fear and shame, so I always come in the back way."

It's around 6.30pm on a sweltering August afternoon. Redmond, due on stage in just over an hour's time, is fiddling with an electric fan while also trying to get ice out of the fridge and struggling with an enormous bouquet of flowers some well-wisher has just given her as a belated birthday present. (She turned 40 a few days ago.) "It's like Ramadan, my birthday - it goes on and on. I'll just stick these in the sink."

When the flowers are safely dispensed with, the ice procured, the water poured and the fan set, she sits down, puts on a serious expression, and waits to be interrogated about her role in Beautiful People, one of the few movies she has made in recent years.

"Film acting is not my natural milieu," she says, screwing up her features in mock dismay when asked why she shies away from the big screen. "It's not that I don't like the camera - I do - but what stands me in very good stead on stage - the extreme mobility of my face - is just a horror to behold on camera."

In Beautiful People, Redmond plays Kate Higgins, the long- suffering wife of a BBC correspondent (Gilbert Martin) who has witnessed too much bloodshed in Bosnia and is fast hurtling toward a nervous breakdown. Dizdar interweaves Kate's story with those of dozens of other characters.

The film begins with two seeming strangers beating lumps out of each other on a bus. One of them is a Serb, the other a Croat and they're fighting their own mini-Bosnian war in the heart of London. If they are at loggerheads, so is everybody else.

This is a vast, sprawling human comedy with even more characters and plot lines than Altman's Short Cuts. Stressed doctors, callous politicians, teachers, bank managers, journalists, and football thugs are trying and failing to make sense of their lives in the big, bad city.

"What I liked about the film is how many little wars are going on all the time," Redmond says. "There are all sorts of conflicts happening within all those family units which are looked at."

Perhaps surprisingly, Redmond's character turns out to be one of the more level-headed. With her shock of red hair and gaudy, slightly tattered clothes (which apparently came from her own wardrobe), she looks as fiery and eccentric as ever, but by comparison with her husband and most of the other oddballs who flit through the story (or, indeed, the Glaswegian hairdresser she plays in Perfect Days), she is a bastion of common sense and normality.

It is Redmond's character who takes matters in hand when she finds a grenade in her husband's overnight bag, and who contacts the hypno- therapist when the husband threatens to amputate his own leg.

When Redmond first read the script, she thought Kate "if not ditzy, was at least coming from left of field". Dizdar's one tip about the character was "this woman would be Tracey Emin's best friend, whatever that meant, and he kept telling me he'd cast me because of what I was wearing and I was certifiable. But then I turned out to be this rather downplayed person."

Even if her own part is relatively low-key, Redmond believes that there is ''a sparkle and a fizz" to Beautiful People rarely found in British films. Dizdar combines Ken Loach-style social realism with the kind of outlandish flights of fantasy and sentimentality you'd expect to find in a film by Sarajevo director Emir Kusturica. Even the saddest and most squalid scenes come laced with comedy. "I don't think it belittles somebody's tragedy to be able to laugh at it simultaneously. This is in no respect a po-faced film. It makes its points all the more clearly for giving audiences the room to laugh," says Redmond.

Dizdar's view of London is that of the outsider, baffled and intrigued by the sheer enormity of the place, a feeling Redmond can identify with. "I'm a foreigner in London too," she says. "There have been moments when I've responded to it in exactly the same way. I do find the apparent size of London disheartening. I like cities that you can get across in one afternoon - cities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow or Manchester."

London, though, has warmed to Redmond. Perfect Days is well into its run and the box-office is still holding up. "I'm just delighted that a play with five full-on Glaswegians speaking as those Glaswegians would and do is not only surviving but doing well in the west end of London," enthuses Redmond. She lists the responses of the different audiences who've been turning up every night: The Americans love how "in-your-face" the show is; the Swedes don't tend to start laughing until the second half; and even the Anglo-Saxons seem to enjoy themselves once they get over Lochhead's salty vernacular.

She is tied to the play for a good few months yet. (It's likely she'll still be playing Barbs, hairdresser extraordinaire, until Christmas, when Liza Minnelli is booked to take over the theatre.) And what next? "When this ends, a wee lie down in a darkened room is what I need. But I'd like to do some Greek drama and to be the person wandering through the back of shot in a film by Pedro - I can never say this man's name - Aldomovar? Alvodomar? Almovardo? I love his films."

Beautiful People is the closing film at this year's Edinburgh Film Festival. It opens in the UK on 17 September.

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