Robert Lindsay was sitting on the set of The Fever Syndrome at London’s Hampstead theatre, having his photo taken. Instantly recognisable everywhere since his stupidly handsome days – playing the eponymous Marxist in the BBC’s sitcom Citizen Smith from 1977 to 1980 – his face nevertheless, at 72, has an unexpected quality. It’s craggier than you remember, and much more relaxed than you’d expect. Content, even.
The Fever Syndrome is a family drama set in New York, where the adult children of an eminent IVF scientist are congregating in his creaky brownstone to have a number of things out. It’s a powerful, moving work – “in the audience, every night, we’ve had people sobbing” – of which he is passionately proud and a little defensive. “I haven’t read the reviews, but I know from what friends have been saying that the actors have come out of it really, really well, but critics have had a go at the play. I think they’re wrong. It’s remarkable what [Alexis Zegerman] has written.” This is a habit, and an endearing one – mention his stunningly malevolent and charismatic performance in GBH in 1991, and it’s, “Oh, that was all Alan Bleasdale”. He’s equally generous about his co-stars: I now know much more about how great Emma Thompson was, in Me and My Girl (a West End hit in 1985, which transferred to Broadway, and made Lindsay’s name there), or what Zoë Wanamaker was like in the long-running BBC sitcom My Family, than about any plaudits or career-defining moments they delivered for Lindsay.
