Cheryl is still famous enough not to need a surname. On the poster for 2:22 A Ghost Story, the spooky hit play in which the singer formerly known as Tweedy, Cole and Fernandez-Versini is about to make her West End debut, she is billed simply and definitively as “Cheryl”. The 39-year-old has been using the mononym for so long now – since her 2012 solo hit “Call My Name” – that she didn’t even think about it until she saw her name on the Lyric Theatre’s marquee. “I was like, I guess that’s what it is then,” she says in the warm Geordie accent familiar from her judge’s critiques on The X Factor.
She has maintained a low profile in recent years. In the late Noughties, when she juggled The X Factor with a hugely successful music career – first as a member of Girls Aloud and then as a solo star – Cheryl endured a level of press attention that she describes as “unbearable”. It’s to her immense credit, then, that she doesn’t seem wary or guarded when we meet at a south London rehearsal space where she and her castmates are knocking the play into shape. She enters the room with a beaming smile. She is dressed casually but immaculately, with her hair tied back – very off-duty pop star.
