Jane Asher makes her Chichester Festival Theatre debut in The Circle

And she's hoping that it will be first of many appearances there now that she is living not so very far away: “We live on the West Sussex/Hampshire border. We have had a weekend place there for a long time but we moved there permanently about two years ago. Like so many people Covid changed things for us but it was more about simplicity really, I guess. We were there when it all kicked off and the children said ‘Don't come back to London. There is no point.’ And so we just stayed.

“I have been in London all my life and there are some things I miss, like when you are invited to something you think ‘Oh that sounds nice!’ but then you have to think ‘Is it worth it?’ with that journey and getting back late at night. But basically we are extremely happy here. It is very beautiful and a really lovely area. It's just a really great place to be.”

And now comes that long-awaited Chichester debut – though, of course, Jane and her husband Gerald Scarfe have been among audiences at the Festival Theatre plenty of times over the years and Gerald actually worked there on the show Rhinoceros. But now Somerset Maugham’s play The Circle, directed by Tom Littler, is a great place for Jane to start on the Chichester stage.

“A lot of people don't consider what a brilliant playwright Somerset Maugham was. Many people don't even realise that he wrote plays because the short stories are so wonderful but I did read this play quite a long time ago and somebody asked me would I be interested but I was actually doing something else at the time. But I did read it and I remember thinking what a great play it was and what a great part it would be.”

Jane plays Lady Kitty, a society beauty who notoriously abandoned her stuffy husband Clive (Clive Francis, The Crown), and eloped with the handsome Lord Porteous (Nicholas Le Prevost, Shakespeare in Love, Testament of Youth). Thirty years later, love’s young dream has descended into non-stop squabbling… Meanwhile their son Arnold faces the same marital fate as his wife Elizabeth threatens to elope with the dashing Teddie Luton.

“Lady Kitty ran away with her husband's best friend in the middle of a dinner party leaving a note in a pin cushion, leaving behind not just a husband but also a five-year-old son. When the play opens the son is married to a woman who is very fascinated by the story and she has invited me as Lady Kitty and my lover to come to visit. She and the rest of the household are awaiting us. When Lady Kitty first appears, she appears in a very very different way to what you were expecting. Lady Kitty appears to have become this ridiculously shallow foolish woman desperate to look younger than she is… and you discover that it is partly because of the horrendous time both of them, particularly the woman, have had since running away because it was something that was just so desperately shocking at the time. They were being shunned and ostracised and they were forced to flee England because it was so bad. And now she seems this rather silly character but when it comes to it, you realise that there is rather more to her than that…”