Amanda Abbington is horrified by what’s going on across the Atlantic.
“We think we’re screwed over here,” sighs the star of Sherlock and Mr Selfridge, “but America is completely fractured. It’s terrifying. It’s all due to Donald Trump and the legacy he left.”
She doesn’t see much improvement in US-UK relations since Trump had to be dragged kicking and screaming from the White House two years ago. “Because we have a new prime minister every week, we aren’t particularly stable. And sometimes Biden is not even getting the name right.” When he welcomed Rishi Sunak as the latest prime minister in October, Biden called him “Rashid Sanook”. “No, no, Joe,” says Abbington, who is a mix of fun and fury, “that’s not even close to what our prime minister is called.”
We’re discussing this because the frequently troubled relationship between the two countries lies at the heart of Abbington’s latest work. Middle America comes to Middle England in The Unfriend, the new play by Steven Moffat, former show-runner on Doctor Who and Sherlock, which opens at the Criterion Theatre in London on Sunday.
While on holiday, a well-mannered English suburban couple, Debbie (Abbington) and Peter (Reece Shearsmith), meet Elsa (Frances Barber), an over-the-top, Trump-loving, Maga-supporting, QAnon-spouting, anti-vax-cheerleading American widow.
At the end of the holiday, they exchange details, as you do. Debbie and Peter tell Elsa to get in touch if she is ever in England – with absolutely no thought that it will ever happen.
However, when Elsa invites herself to visit Debbie and Peter, they think it might be wise to check her out online. To their horror – and way too late – they discover who Elsa really is: a very dangerous customer indeed. A breezy holiday friendship is now putting their children in peril.
Debbie and Peter confront the most difficult challenge a British person can ever face: how do you shield your loved ones from clear and present danger without appearing a teeny bit discourteous?
The Unfriend, which is directed by Moffat’s old Sherlock compadre Mark Gatiss and is transferring to the West End after a successful run in Chichester last year, has a lot to say about the British curse of politesse.
“It’s so beautifully observed,” says Abbington. “When we meet people on holiday, we go, ‘Let’s swap email addresses. We’ll catch up when we get home.’ And invariably, it never happens because we don’t want it to. We just say it out of politeness. But Americans are more like, ‘No, we’ll fix a date.’”
And that’s what happens in The Unfriend. “Debbie and Peter are too polite to say to Elsa. ‘Just get out of our house.’ She ends up staying for ages and will not budge. The play is about English mannerisms and how we just don’t say no.”
Audiences will identify with this element of The Unfriend. “We’ve had a few people say to us after the show, ‘We invited somebody over and they stayed for two weeks, and we didn’t have the guts to say no.’ It could be anybody. Peter and Debbie could be most people in suburban England.”
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Perhaps we need to be more prepared to follow the example of Abbington’s father. “When my mum and dad had dinner parties, and my dad had had enough, he’d say, ‘I’m just going up to the loo,’ and he would never come back down again. My mum would invariably be left with his friends from work, and he’d be upstairs asleep!”
Now 48, Abbington was brought up in Hertfordshire, where she still lives with her two teenage children and her fiance, the stunt performer Jonathan Goodwin.
As a youngster, she had set her heart on becoming a dancer until she tried to do the splits with no warm-up and tore her groin muscles. So she moved into acting and made her screen debut in 1996 in The Bill, playing the part of “Lady Car Driver”.
Abbington was introduced to a rather bigger audience in 2014, when she joined the cast of the global hit Sherlock as Mary, the wife of Holmes’ best friend Dr John Watson, played by her then real-life partner Martin Freeman.
After splitting from Freeman in 2015, Abbington is preparing to marry Goodwin this summer. They’d known each other for 10 years on social media before they met. He proposed to her within 30 minutes of their first face-to-face meeting in 2021.
However, just two months later Goodwin was paralysed after a stunt he was preparing for America’s Got Talent: Extreme went disastrously wrong. Even though Goodwin told her she could walk away from the relationship, Abingdon was having none of it. “The accident doesn’t matter,” she asserts. “Unfortunately, he can’t do some of the things he wants to do. We can’t just go for walks in the woods any more. But as far as I’m concerned, nothing changed.
“We are blissfully happy. He’s kind and generous, and he just makes me laugh. If you’re looking for anybody who’s got a positive, glass-half-full mental outlook, Jonathan is that person. He handles the paralysis in a way that is just inspiring. He changed my life.”
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Ultimately, she says, the accident merely strengthened the bond between them: “We are closer and tighter than ever – every day is a joy.”
This is a good example of what Abbington brings to every aspect of her life: a rare sense of passion. She is, for example, a very outspoken presence on Twitter, though she acknowledges that some pretty awful stuff goes down in the Wild West of social media. “If you’re throwing vitriol and bile out across the internet, you don’t see the effect you have on people. We are losing that sense of empathy.”
But Abbington has a very cunning way of dealing with abusive tweets. “I’ve had death threats before from people. That was when I was with Martin, and they thought I was getting in between Martin and Ben’s real-life, actual love affair. They got very upset about that.”
However, “when that happens, I just say, ‘Let’s have a cuddle and a cup of tea,’ and they don’t know where to go with that. So they just back down and go, ‘OK, it was good to have that debate.’ You kill it with kindness and manage to dilute the toxicity. It’s good to put that kindness out there.”
Abbington does not feel so well disposed towards the Government, though. She is particularly incensed by the social inequalities the Conservatives are creating. “Really more so than ever now. For instance, the Government are making out that it’s the strikers who are wrong.”
Her response is, “No, look towards the people who are taking hundreds of millions of pounds of profit from energy companies and the trains. The workers are the people who look after us. They drive this country. We are in a mess as far as the Tory government are concerned. I just find them repellent, I really do. I have literally no respect for them because they can’t seem to do their job.”
Abbington is equally fired up about the way the Government is treating refugees. “We have to be very careful about the language we use about people who are coming here from war-torn places. They’re not coming to steal or to take your jobs.
“If they’re putting their children in a boat, and crossing the sea, the place they’re fleeing is worse than that. They’re not doing this because they want to go on a holiday in England. They’re doing it because the place they’re leaving is so horrible and terrifying. That has pushed them to get in a boat and maybe die doing that.”
She’s not finished. “We have a very unsympathetic government that says it’s just about looking after yourself. So as a society, we have to step up and do what the Tory government aren’t doing. We have to make sure that our next-door neighbours are OK. I think the population of Britain are by and large lovely people. It’s just we’re governed by a nasty, selfish group of people who don’t care.”
See what I mean about Abbington’s passion?
Sometimes, she continues, “When you think about this government, it just feels a little bit like, ‘Wow, you know we can see what you’re doing. Do you not think we can?’ Every day I wake up and go, ‘What have the Government done now? Oh, yeah. I’m not surprised.’”
A pause, before the veteran of many Twitter battles concludes: “It feels like we’re being trolled by our own government.”
The Unfriend runs at the Criterion Theatre from 15 January to 16 April