Maar's attack

THE beaming, blonde woman who answers the door of the stylish house in Chiswick, west London, seems at first to be Toyah Willcox's better-looking, less scary younger sister.

It's the lisp though, the most famous in pop history, which gives her away. This is Toyah Willcox, punk survivor-turned-Teletubbies narrator and, in her latest incarnation, Fringe performer in Picasso's Women, a series of heart-rending monologues in which she joins Susannah York, Geraldine Fitzgerald and Amanda Harris to portray the artist's lovers.

Willcox is 42, but will make a convincing Dora Maar, the half- French, half-Yugoslavian woman who was 29 when she took up with the 54-year-old artist in 1936.

At the time, Dora, then establishing herself as an artist and photographer, became one of Picasso's mistresses. She was the inspiration for a series of paintings which became increasingly grotesque as she fell from favour. Throughout her life, she had bouts of madness and electroshock therapy, tried to rise up the 'mistress rankings' by getting pregnant and was cast aside by a genius who could never love anyone more than his work.

Looking at Dora, Willcox says she sees how her own life could have turned out. "She's someone who reminds me of what I was like in my 20s - lost, angry, looking for love but getting badly hurt along the way." Behind the self-assured, fierce exterior screeching early 1980s anthems such as It's A Mystery, I Want To Be Free and Thunder in The Mountains, it seems, lurked a woman in turmoil.

After being bullied at school, Willcox had enough emotional problems to make Ally McBeal look like Ally McCoist. "Punk appealed because it was about freedom and this extreme expression of raw emotion."

Other similarities between Dora, who died in 1997, aged 89, and Willcox are undeniable. Both dabbled in Buddhism, neither had children (the latter by choice - she has been sterilised), and both were drawn to an older and artistic man at the experimental end of his field. Willcox has been married for almost 15 years to Robert Fripp, King Crimson's guitarist.

But Willcox is critical of the woman she plays. "It's not hard for me to manufacture Dora's pain. I have been through emotional agony in almost every relationship with men, aside from my father and Robert. But she and the other mistress failed to see there are two things you can't deny a man - friendship and sex. Picasso's women craved his affection so much they failed to do this. They were part of a sickening and horrible artistic experiment and part of me thinks they have only themselves to blame."

Sitting in her lounge, Willcox gestures at the gold and platinum discs on the wall and says: "I don't look back and I have no connection with who I was 20 years ago. These discs are about the only memories I have from that time".

As Willcox distances herself from her past, it seems opportune to raise a certain picture spied on the noticeboard of an uncle's factory in deepest Fife circa Easter 1982, in which her chest was on display. "It was only one breast that was visible," she says, remembering the shot. "I had my nipple blackened too. I did it because I thought it was funny. People tried to shame me for it but shame is just something people impose on you."

Is it, perhaps, something devised by religions? "Perhaps. Christianity, at its roots, was all-empowering and magical and mystical and I still believe in that. But I struggle with the patriarchal system it became."

Willcox is not your conventional Songs Of Praise presenter but it is her spiritual odyssey she credits for pulling her out of the cycle of despair and anger that plagued her early adulthood. "I went to religious retreats - mainly Buddhist ones - and sorted my head out. The sort of stuff Dora never did."

Even more remarkable is how she met Fripp. "He was working in New York and had a premonition we would get married. There was one problem - we'd never met. So he flew over and asked if we could work together. After a week, he proposed."

Currently, Willcox is contemplating taking her band back on the road, a decision which could be clinched if a white label dance remix of It's A Mystery , with which she had no involvement, gets mainstream release.

Meanwhile, she is still committed to pantomime and has spent four Christmases in Jack and the Beanstalk. A third series of the BBC children's programme Barmy Aunt Boomerang, in which she plays the eponymous dead Australian soap star, is likely. This will mean spending three months of next year in Glasgow ("My favourite place in the world, along with Paris"). Also, an abridged version of Picasso's Women may run in the West End later in the year.

Does Willcox keep working because she is afraid of the day the recognition and adulation stops? "Yes and no. I'm addicted to pressure. I will get terrible stage fright before each performance. But you have got to remember, it's not all been about adulation. I have been ridiculed for 50% of what I have done in a career of more than 20 years."

One final matter must be tackled. The name Toyah was once, like Kylie and Madonna, associated with one person. Then came Coronation Street's Toyah Battersby, a character ostensibly born at the height of the singer's fame. How did she react? "I was really pissed off. My name is very important to me. I nearly called my book The Original Toyah. But living out loud is undeniably what I do."

Toyah Willcox is in Picasso's Women at the Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh, from August 13-28. Times vary. Box offices 0131- 226 2428 or 0131-226 5138. Living Out Loud, her autobiography, is published later this month (Hodder and Stoughton, #16.99) Toyah Ann Willcox was born in Birmingham in May, 1958. Originally an actress, she first sang on the soundtrack to Derek Jarman's punk epic Jubilee (1977), where she was teamed with Adam Ant as The Maneaters. Two years later she played Monkey in Franc Roddam's cult mod film, Quadrophenia and began a music career spawning hits including It's A Mystery. She is married to King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp.

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