Culture HOT TICKET: Lady is one for perfect diction; She's enjoyed The Good Life but now Penelope Keith is relishing her role as Lady Bracknell, as Jenny Chambers reports.

Byline: Jenny Chambers

THE most famous line in Oscar Wilde's comedy classic The Importance of Being Earnest has to be: "A handbag!" That's the incredulous response from Lady Bracknell to a bizarre tale.

And it's a line Penelope Keith, who stars in the play at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle this week, seems perfectly equipped to deliver. The popular actress, famous for her voice, believes good diction is an essential tool of her trade.

"The Importance of Being Earnest is a great play," she says.

"My worry, when my generation falls off the branch, is that the lack of vocal training for younger actors will mean that we lose the use of the language.

"Our language is diminishing daily as more of our verbs become nouns and vice versa. There's a whole canon of great plays which have a lot to say about today, but you do need to have good diction for them. I get everything from the text. I'm an actor because I love words and the way different writers use them and when you get a magical text like this, it's amazing."

Wilde's comedy of manners sees Lady Bracknell preside over a tangled web of deceit and romantic intrigue.

"Of course," says Penelope, "the monkey on the shoulder is the famous handbag line and everyone knows Edith Evans (who played Lady Bracknell in the 1952 film version) for it, so you just have to close your eyes and think of England and say it.

"I approach it by what people say about her, how Wilde writes for her and how quick-witted she is. And where that fits into the whole of the play."

A star of stage and screen, Penelope, now 67, had always wanted to act.

An only child, whose father left home when she was young, she was brought up by her mother who would take her to the West End. "At the age of five, I apparently told my mother that I wanted to be an actress or a nun. She said nuns can't wear pretty clothes so I decided to be an actress - and I didn't change.

"There weren't the amount of amusements for children when I was young: people went to the theatre, and that's what I find different about today - theatre seems to get sidelined.

"I saw my first straight play when I was eight or nine and we went to musicals at Drury Lane - and I went on doing it. It became a habit. You never made a noise at the theatre, so my mother would unwrap the chocolates before we went in."

Her career began in rep theatre: "I'd spoken the Shaw and the Coward and the Wilde in a professional theatre, and that's the difference between then and now. One didn't have career plans like people do now. Most people started their careers by being a jobbing actor because that's how you learned your craft. And it is a craft, and crafts are caught and not taught and you learn by doing it."

Her extensive TV work includes her best-loved roles - as Margo in The Good Life and Audrey in To The Manor Born.

The Good Life, co-starring Richard Briers, Paul Eddington and Felicity Kendal, involved a couple who spurned the rat race to become self-sufficient in their garden - much to the disgust of snobby neighbour Margo.

"It was filmed in a place called Northwood," says Penelope. "They had to find a house with people who wouldn't mind having their garden dug up once a year. It must have been the most productive garden in London - it was dug up and had animals all over it, loads of compost!"

But, in real-life, Penelope is the very opposite of Margo, who hated getting her hands dirty.

"I have chickens now and I haven't bought an egg for about eight years - and my chickens' eggs are divine. I've always been interested in gardening and I'm a bit obsessive now.

"I believe in recycling. It wasn't called that when I was young, of course: it was thrift, then it became meanness and now it's recycling. It's strange - when you live for enough time, you realise that what goes around comes around."

Despite being a private person, she enjoys touring.

"I think it's rather arrogant of people to expect their reputation to stand up in a few square miles of London where the prices are too high anyway and the programmes cost an arm and a leg," she says.

Read our review of The Importance of Being Earnest in tomorrow's Journal.

CAPTION(S):

COMMANDING PRESENCE: Penelope Keith as Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.; TELEVISION FAVOURITE: Penelope Keith In The Good Life.