Frances Ruffelle on working with Alan Cumming: 'It changed my life and my creative journey'
She’s a West End star and Tony Award winner, but Alan Cumming had to work his socks off to persuade Frances Ruffelle that she could write too
When somebody says no to you, it usually means a hope or dream is being quashed. Not so with Alan Cumming and Frances Ruffelle. When these two darlings of the West End and Broadway teamed up for a creative project in 2019, Cumming put his foot down in the face of Ruffelle’s insecurity. ‘The people at New York Theatre Workshop had seen my one-woman show on Broadway and liked it,’ explains Ruffelle. ‘So they asked me to bring them an idea for one of their residential workshops. I also needed to bring a director with me, so I asked Alan and said we’ll have to find a writer to come on board with us. But he said, “no, no, no, we’re writing this together”.’ And so the journey to I Can Die Too began.
If Cumming’s inaugural season at Pitlochry Festival Theatre is a basket marked ‘goodies’, then this play with music is a cake baked to perfection and ready to slice. Seven years in the making, I Can Die Too is inspired by Jean Cocteau’s 1930s theatrical monologue La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice), in which a woman talks on the phone to her lover the day before he’s due to marry someone else. The aforementioned idea Ruffelle took to New York Theatre Workshop was a kind of ‘play within a play’ in which an actor attempts to stage The Human Voice but keeps falling apart during rehearsals as it’s so reminiscent of her own life.
‘I was given the script by a friend who thought I’d be good in the role,’ she explains. ‘And I thought, “I’d love to do this but only if I could stop the play and tell the audience what I really thought of her”. And that’s when the idea came to me to actually write it about someone being in rehearsal with that character.’ Acting and singing have come as naturally as breathing to Ruffelle since childhood (as a daughter of the late stage-school doyenne Sylvia Young, how could they not?) but writing was a whole other matter. She recalls being ‘absolutely petrified’ at the prospect of co-writing her first play, but with Cumming by her side the mountain felt less steep. That is, until he had to step off it.
‘Alan and I were born in the same year, and when we wrote together we were literally finishing each other’s sentences. We were so on the same page, and it was incredible to be creative with him like that. But because Alan is a big superstar and he’s so busy, I couldn’t wait around forever. So he asked me if I wanted someone else to come on board as a collaborator. He was very happy for the play to continue; he just seriously didn’t have the time.’ Enter Sally George, who helped Ruffelle finish the piece. But, of course, one of the reasons Cumming has been hectic recently is his artistic directorship at Pitlochy Festival Theatre. Which made it the obvious choice for the show’s premiere.
‘A month or two after Alan took up that role, he thought about staging this show at Pitlochry,’ says Ruffelle. ‘Obviously he is a co-writer so in that respect it’s very handy who you know. But we were sending him drafts over the years and he would call up and say, “Frankie, I think this is so great!” So I know he believed in it; he wouldn’t be putting it on otherwise.’ Cumming also had another ‘no’ up his sleeve when Ruffelle toyed with the idea of handing the play over to a different performer. ‘I said to him, “you know, I don’t have to play this role; I can just be a writer”. But he was like, “no, no, no, no, you’re doing it”.’
As the first person to play the iconic role of Éponine in the London and Broadway productions of Les Misérables (winning a Tony Award in the process), Ruffelle is no stranger to belting out a tune to serve a story. She also represented the UK at 1994’s Eurovision with ‘Lonely Symphony’ (coming tenth which, by today’s standards, is remarkably high). And most recently in Scotland, Ruffelle was seen performing The Scot And The Showgirl at the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe, a fabulous hour of show tunes sung with passion and wit alongside her real-life partner, Norman Bowman.
I Can Die Too is packed with original songs, many of which she co-wrote, but they don’t follow the usual musical theatre format. ‘I do believe that in a musical, the song has to take you from A to B, but not all of our songs do that. Because right from the start, Alan and I wanted to do a play that merged into a concert. So some of the songs really help you understand what the character is feeling, but mainly we think of them more like a release; an entertainment. We come out of the play and go back into it. And the other thing I wanted was for most of the songs to be uplifting. Even if they’re ballads, they mostly have positive messages. Because the character is quite negative and going through hell, so everything is about bringing her back from that.’
Ruffelle says Cumming’s belief in her as a writer has ‘changed my life and my creative journey’. So while the process has been challenging and forced her to revisit unhappy memories from the past, it’s led to a production rooted in real life, love and heartbreak. ‘It’s been an emotional journey because a lot of it touches on my own childhood and experiences,’ says Ruffelle. ‘So although it’s not all about me, and I exaggerate and use my imagination and create, it has all come from my heart.’
I Can Die Too, Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Saturday 11 July–Sunday 2 August.