Here's to you, Mrs Robinson

IRENE Macdougall has been taking her work home with her. "Last Tuesday, I had all evening, so I thought, no television, just script, script, script," says the mainstay of the Dundee Rep ensemble. "I did about two hours’ work and then I thought, ‘Actually, it would be really helpful if I’d had a few drinks.’ So I opened a bottle of wine, poured myself three glasses one after the other - and it doesn’t take much for me - and I found it quite useful. You don’t give a damn when you’re tiddly."

That sensation of reckless abandon was what Macdougall was looking for. She’s the hard-working type, someone who worries about things, and the quality she least shares with her latest character is selfishness. The part she’s playing is Mrs Robinson, the boozy seductress of the young Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate.

For the play’s Scottish premiere, Macdougall is following in the high-heeled footsteps of Kathleen Turner, Jerry Hall and Anne Bancroft to star as the desperate housewife with nothing better to do than have an affair with the son of her husband’s partner. In the Dustin Hoffman role in Dundee’s production is 26-year-old Ewan Donald who joined the company, appropriately enough, as part of its graduate training scheme.

Capturing Mrs Robinson’s alcoholic rashness is the least of Macdougall’s challenges, however. For the character’s chat-up technique is far from subtle. She simply appears naked before the unsuspecting Benjamin - and, of course, the audience - and asks him to sleep with her.

Macdougall, 46, has stripped off on stage before - in A Man With Connections at Perth Theatre and Unidentified Human Remains at the Traverse - but 10 years on, she’s not finding the prospect any less daunting.

"Hopefully it’ll be very dark," she laughs nervously. "It won’t be for very long and I’m going to hate the first time I do it. I’m going to feel awful. I am older and that’s apparent. There was a moment when I thought, ‘I don’t think a woman of my age would take her clothes off to seduce someone.’ It is utterly inappropriate - and then I realised that’s the important thing.

"If I was going to seduce a younger man, I certainly wouldn’t take my clothes off to do it. And when they did come off, it’d only be when we were very close. It says something about Mrs Robinson’s state of mind. The nudity expresses her inappropriate behaviour. It should make people draw breath like they’re sucking lemons. It’s putting a young man in a very odd situation, which is also the point. And it’s also very funny because all the family and friends are downstairs."

HER NERVOUSNESS SAYS a lot about why audiences are so provoked by this play, written by Terry Johnson, drawing on the book and the film. It’s not just that society is uncomfortable with the idea of an older woman sleeping with a younger man, it’s also that we’re uneasy about any expression of sexuality once a woman passes her early 30s. Ironically, the sexy legs cutting a scissors shape across the Dundee poster belong not to Macdougall but to the younger Emily Winter (not that Macdougall is complaining).

"Our culture still perceives an older woman who does something outwith the norms as dangerous and bad," she says. "Having hit my mid-40s, I am aware of getting older - and getting older as a woman. This play is making me think about that a lot more."

Has she ever had a younger boyfriend herself? "No, but I’ve had boyfriends who were older than me who acted like little boys," she laughs. "I would never have the courage. I’m very conscious that I’m a lot older, say, than Ewan and that he’s got to get close up and dirty and I’m more worried for him. He’s got to look at me half-naked and, because of that, I’m made more aware of my age.

"We have literally just come out of generations upon generations of it being acceptable for older men and younger women to get together, but not acceptable the other way around. It’s deep in our culture. There’s definitely a feeling that it’s not quite right. But I also feel that about older men and younger women. It’s appalling that men can look at a woman and go, "Phwoar!" I find it so degrading that an older man can talk about a younger woman’s sexuality in that way. I don’t find that any different to a woman doing it. I can think of a few older men who do it to nearly every younger woman who walks into a bar. That I find extraordinary."

She says that in a society where the female image is so important, it’s difficult for women not to be at least partially flattered by such attention.

"Occasionally there’s someone who’ll make a ribald comment and there’s a bit of me that’s angry and there’s a bit of me, despite myself, that thinks, ‘I’m glad they find me a sexual being.’ But it’s not right because you should feel comfortable in yourself."

Mrs Robinson, she argues, is not a bad person but a damaged woman in a damaged relationship. She is a product of her time - and Macdougall insists on looking at The Graduate as a historical play - but perhaps that time is not so far removed from our own. "I wouldn’t have a problem at all if an older woman was going out with a younger man," says Macdougall. "But they would have a lot to work out because society doesn’t make it easy. As they get older, women feel as if they’re crawling into invisibility. That can make you quite angry sometimes."

The Graduate, Dundee Rep (01382 223 530), May 18 to June 4