From the moment she appears in David Jenkins’s luxurious set – piano dressing table and double bed

From the moment she appears in David Jenkins’s luxurious set – piano, dressing table, and double bed in front of a tilted proscenium arch – Turner is keen to impress on us that we are darlings, exciting people, dear friends. This is the late 1940s, when she was appearing in Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads and Marlon Brando has been fired. Tallulah is happy to talk to her friends on the phone and happy to talk to her “friends” in the audience. She even offers one of us – as if we’d drifted into a panto – some of her scent.

We know she’s promiscuous, but there’s a limit to the number of different relationships you can have with the same audience.
As the outspoken Broadway star, in Sandra Ryan Heyward’s first play, premiered at Chichester, Kathleen Turner gives a raucous, funny, full- blown performance: dirty laugh, generous smile and – when she sings snatches of popular tunes – a touchingly smokey voice. When the famous actress gets to baring her soul, and later on baring her breasts, does she think there are just a couple of us listening in or is she aware that she’s in the presence of hundreds? If it’s the latter, it’s one hell of an apartment. This entails finding out not so much who she thinks she is but who she thinks you are. As we sit, watching Kathleen Turner play Tallulah Bankhead in Tallulah!, sharing boozy reminiscences in her New York apartment, we wonder how on earth it was that we slipped past the liveried doorman downstairs and got in here. If you’re going to spend an intimate evening with a world-famous actress it helps to know what kind of relationship she has in mind.

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