Basingstoke Gazette 21st February 2003

Date Published: Friday 21 February 2003

Mandana from heaven
by Graham Bye

Mandana Jones when seen on television a couple of weeks ago, actress Mandana Jones was with June Whitfield and Jeremy Sheffield in the second of the BBC's new Afternoon Play series.
Before that, she was one of the Bad Girls, a lesbian murderess who escaped from prison dressed up as a nurse with a blonde wig, getting on a bus heading to Spain.
"I had another quirky role in the soap London Bridge," she says. "I was in that for three years, as a doctor who became a methadone drug addict. Although television money is very tempting, I wanted to get back to my real stage craft."
Now she is at Basingstoke's Haymarket Theatre as Desdemona to Ricky Fearon's Othello.
She explained that Mandana is an old Persian name. Her mother is from Iran and her father is Welsh. Although she was born in London, she visited Iran when she was five. "It left me with some very vivid memories and I would love to go back again. But not just at present.
"My father was an engineer and because my brothers didn't follow him into the profession, he was keen to see me in a construction helmet ordering men around on a site. But the greatest influence was my English teacher. Through her I developed a taste for acting and, for a while, I took Saturday drama coaching in a flat above a greengrocer's in Kings Cross."
Her acting career got off to a slow start - first with the English Shakespeare Company as assistant stage manager on Julius Caesar; which gave her the chance to watch the actors, seeing how they behaved and how they developed their roles.
In The Merchant of Venice, she understudied all the women's parts and played some bit parts, "all the time working with great actors and learning a lot".
Later she played Caesar's wife Calpurnia and then went to the National Theatre for the famous, or infamous, Robert Le Fage production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. "It was absolutely magical, but crazy and really dark and nightmarish. It was set in mud and all the fairies were little blue lizards living in a swamp. It certainly wasn't traditionally pretty and fluffy."
Mandana (pictured) joined the Drama Centre in London and through its offshoot, Concentric Circles, she has arrived in Basingstoke to play Desdemona in Othello.
"The whole cast is from the Drama Centre, which means we are a sort of tribe," she explains. "We already know each other and so don't have to go through that getting-to-know-you business."
Her Desdemona is played as a very chic Italian lady, effortlessly fashionable, as so many Italians are. "I see her as quite playful, a bit like Posh Spice.
"Although Desdemona has a style coming from within, she plays with her clothes, dressing up like a little girl would. She is where the action is."
Othello is at The Haymarket (01256 465566) until tomorrow night.