TRAGEDY AND CHARITY In October 2002, my younger brother, Clive, was killed in the Bali bombing. He was there for a rugby weekend with the Hong Kong Football Club. He was 33. When Clive was killed, my parents got in touch with the British consul-general in Indonesia, Jim Liddell, and he told them about the East Bali Poverty Project. It's run by David Booth MBE. My parents contacted him and decided it was a good cause. He's working in an incredibly poor area of Bali, where there was high illiteracy and so much malnutrition the people were getting goitres. Now there are six schools, primary health care, nutrition supplements, clean water. It's become the family cause and when my theatre company performs in Hong Kong next week, all of the profits will go as a donation.
FULL CIRCLE I moved to Hong Kong in 1960, when I was a year old, and Clive and my sister were born there. My father worked for the Hong Kong Telephone Company and we lived there for 25 years. It still feels like home. Clive worked for DHL in Hong Kong: he'd be cross with me for not knowing exactly what he did but it was to do with complicated contracts and medical supplies. There were many young people [in Bali] from Hong Kong; many of the families had a terrible time. But DHL sent a special plane in and Clive's body was back in Hong Kong by the Monday, after the bomb on Saturday, which made it easier for us. We held the service on the Friday at St John's Cathedral [in Central], where he had been christened, so it was a full circle.
BLAME AND FORGIVENESS Clive was such fun; he was intelligent and worked hard and played hard and got on with everybody. It was a terrible blow but he wouldn't have wanted things to stop. He would have wanted us to get up and grab life and enjoy it. There's no one you can actually blame. It was so complicated. It's not as if somebody went up to him and hit him over the head. We're dealing with something that's political and about the whole world. I say that, but I couldn't recite the Lord's Prayer for five years afterwards. The line As we forgive those who trespass against us just didn't seem true for me for a long time. Because I hadn't forgiven them. Not just the bombers, but the politicians and others.
WORDS OF COMFORT One of the things that helped me get through it was an album that his colleagues put together. One of the things it contained was a copy of a letter written by Clive a few years before he died, to the young wife of a friend of his who died. [He wrote:] 'What I do know is that these tragedies truly define the people who are directly affected by them. Whilst they are unjust and random, those who are left behind must come to terms with the unpredictability of the nature of life itself and it is how you manage to go forward that is [important] ...' It was such an insight into my little brother to read that, and I learned more from that about what he believed about life and death than I had known when he was alive.
FULFILLING DREAMS I grew up on Derek Nimmo's Dinner Theatre in Hong Kong, thinking how much I'd love to do that one day. In fact my first job in the West End [London's theatre district] was playing his daughter in A Friend Indeed, with Geoffrey Palmer and Moira Lister, so, in a way, I did. It was when I was performing in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, with the Royal Shakespeare Company, that I met my husband [Julian Bell]; we didn't actually have a scene together but we became wonderful friends. In Amaretti Angels he plays my husband. We rarely act together but as these performances are all for a charity we care for deeply, we wanted to keep the costs down, and the donations up.
PLAYING THE ANGEL The play was commissioned by [comedy playwright] Sir Alan Ayckbourn in 2001. I was in the original cast: this was written specifically for the restaurant in Alan Ayckbourn's theatre in Scarborough, Yorkshire. We actually sat within the area of the restaurant, slightly raised above the rest of the diners. I don't want to say too much but it's about a man and a woman who meet for a meal, and for half the play the audience has no idea if this is a blind date or whether they have known each other for a long time. During the play - and the meal - the relationship between them unravels. Recently, a friend who was opening an Italian restaurant in London asked us to perform there, and it got rave reviews. In Hong Kong we're performing it in two venues: the Ladies Recreation Club [LRC] and the Football Club.