Chichester Festival Theatre return after precious and poignant family time

She returns in the Birmingham Rep and National Theatre co-production of East Is East by Ayub Khan Din from November 3-6 (main-house) In the piece, George Khan wants to raise his family the proper Pakistani way but hasn’t counted on the distractions of 70s Salford. Abdul and Tariq aren’t ready to be married off, Saleem is pushing artistic boundaries, Meenah’s skirt is too short and Sajid just wants to hide in his parka. Can mum Ella keep the family together? Rachel is thrilled to be joining Tony Jayawardena (as George) and Sophie Stanton (as Ella) on stage at a theatre she loves: “It is lovely to be going back to Chichester. This Is My Family was one of my favourite jobs of all time, everything about it, the music, just everything and the memory is of such incredible warmth, and it was beautifully done. Every day I look at a poster of it. It is right in front of my bed. It always makes me smile. It is one of those shows that I will always cherish. I just loved it, and I had such a fabulous character as Aunty Sian. She was the auntie that everyone would want to have. She doesn’t have her own family but her sister does and she is exactly who you would want to babysit because you know you would get away with murder, but she has a huge heart and would do anything for her niece and her nephew and for her sister. Even though she doesn’t have her own family she is so much part of that extended family. “I had been with the show since the beginning when we did it in Sheffield, me and Clare Burt from the original cast. We were hoping something more would happen with the show but this was April 2019 and the pandemic hit, of course. There were hopes to take it into London but it absolutely had to have the right space. When we did it in Sheffield they did a little tour of pros arch venues to see if it would work in a pros arch theatre, but really it needed places like the Minerva. You need the audience to feel really close to you, just like they are actually part of the camping trip on the stage. You need them close. “I just really really hope it will happen again, and I hope it will be in an era where I am still young enough to play Sian! I just hope the day comes when they decide that it is the moment again for This Is My Family.” Since then of course we have had the pandemic: “It has been a strange time for all of us. I can’t speak for anybody else. I can only speak for me and my friends but there did come a time when we were thinking how on earth are we going to come back from this. “I do feel that our industry was immensely unfairly treated. We had to petition to get any help that came to us. We pay our taxes like anybody else and it took such a long time for that help to come through to us and it took so much petitioning for any help to happen for our industry at all. We are not self-employed. We can’t go into furlough. No one was going to furlough us. It was really difficult. “But the lovely thing was that when lockdown happened it took me back to my family in Wales and for that I will always be grateful. My beautiful mum was diagnosed with cancer and we lost her in May. I had 16 months with my mum, and for that I will be forever grateful. When I first went home she didn’t have her diagnosis. That happened at the time I was there and we went through it with her. She was at home when she died. She was 77. It was myself and my sister and my mum for ten years together. She was a lion. She was immense. I will always be in humble awe of her. She was my mamma; she was my confidant, my friend, my support network, my everything and I will always be so pleased that we had that time together, so pleased that something took me home…”