Spanish Oranges, Alba Arikha’s twisty drama about artistic creation and the price of fame in married life, begins with a spiky encounter between a celebrated writer and the journalist interviewing her. The novelist, Fiona, gets twitchy when he starts recording and balks when he wonders if her fiction is autobiographical. She squirms and stalls until he ends up asking questions with his back turned, to make it less of an ordeal.
Things are not quite as overwrought on our video call when Arikha dials in from Paris. She is accompanied, on screen, by the actor Maryam d’Abo, who is starring in the play in London. So is D’Abo, like Fiona, deeply suspicious of journalists? “Of course,” she says in a friendly tone. Maybe I should turn my back as we talk. Or at least “some” journalists, she adds diplomatically, referring to her formative experience as a “Bond girl”. At the age of 26, she played Kara Milovy, a Czech cellist and would-be sniper who – typically – falls for the charms of Timothy Dalton’s 007 in The Living Daylights.
