Two years ago, in a neat suburban house on a cul-de-sac in Bromley, where all furniture was floral, and every wall painted magnolia, I watched Monica Dolan poke her head out of a loft hatch. She was filming Days of the Bagnold Summer, the adaptation of the much loved graphic novel by Joff Winterhart. Her character, Sue Bagnold, was having an argument with her sulky teenage son, Daniel (Earl Cave). “Was that a bit much?” she asked her director, Simon Bird, at one point. “Try it softer,” he said, later adding, “Gosh. That’s lovely stuff.” Later, in the back garden, Dolan sat and explained what had been going through her mind. “I thought, ‘What if I fall through?’” At 51, the actor had a new challenge. “I think that’s my first ever loft scene, actually.”

In the middle of May this year, I called Dolan at home in London, in a very different world to the lively film set where we’d met. “A friend said that, after this, anything filmed before the coronavirus is going to seem like a period piece,” she said. Not that Bagnold Summer is a period piece: it’s deliberately timeless. But its story of a mother and son, unexpectedly thrown together for a few weeks, has taken on a particular timeliness, too. “How many people must that be happening to, that they didn’t necessarily end up where they wanted to be, or were planning to be, when all of this happened?” she says.

“I’ve seen a lot of Monica’s work, and I love her,” said Bird, on a break from filming. “She’s so brilliant at doing comedy and drama, and that’s where I want the film to exist, somewhere between the two. She can play Rose West amazingly but she’s also hilarious in W1A. So she was a no-brainer, really.”

Dolan has become one of the most recognisable faces on British television, a tremendous character actor seemingly at home in any genre. She won a Bafta for her portrayal of West in Appropriate Adult in 2011, and was nominated again for her role as Marion Thorpe, wife of Jeremy, in A Very English Scandal. She was Welsh PR Tracey in W1A, a part she reprised for the recent surprise Zoom special. Her lockdown has been a prolific time and she sounds as if she’s been incredibly busy. “It’s been nothing like I imagined it would be,” she says.

At first, she thought she would have some time on her hands, but that wasn’t the case at all. There was the BBC Radio 4 series set on the phone, Personal Shopper, and Headlong and Century Film’s series of shorts, Unprecedented, for BBC Four. “And then before we’d filmed that, I was asked to do Talking Heads. It got incredibly busy very quickly, and that was good, I suppose,” she says. “And then right in the middle of that, just before we filmed Unprecedented, my brother died.” 

Her brother, Paul, was 56 and he died on Good Friday. “It was Covid and pneumonia,” she says. She has been in lockdown at her own home, separated from the rest of her family. “My sister is near my mum, so she’s taking care of her at the moment.” There were four Dolan siblings; another sister died of cancer, in 2008. “So I really, really feel for my mum, because she’s outlived two of her children. She’s 86, and she’s absolutely incredible. She’s just so strong. I can’t imagine many people coping with it. So, if anyone asks me about the lockdown, I can’t really talk about it without talking about that, because it’s just been absolutely enormous, and continues to be.”

Everyone is experiencing the pandemic, but, she says, we are not all experiencing it in the same way. “There’s a real disconnect. Some people are in hospital, some people are grieving, some people are irritated that they can’t get what they want from Waitrose, everyone’s worried about whether the schools should go back or not, lots of people are in financial difficulty and want to get back to work, and obviously people are scared of that, too.

“I think that what I find quite difficult is that it’s my brother, and it’s intensely personal, and I love him so much, and at the same time his death suddenly becomes part of a wider global narrative, and I don’t know how I feel about that, really. I’m sure a lot of people are feeling like that.”

Having so much work on has helped. “Especially at the very beginning. I was doing Unprecedented and that was due to be rehearsed and possibly filmed on the Tuesday after Easter, and then I think I found out I got the Talking Heads on the Thursday before Easter. It was all happening at once, and it did get hairy at that time. But I think when you’re in shock, your body just creates a great surge of energy, so it’s great to have somewhere to put it all.” 

As well as revisiting the classics, Talking Heads will feature two new monologues written by Alan Bennett. Dolan is performing one of those, called The Shrine. “I play Lorna, and I don’t think I’m ruining if I say that she’s had a bereavement, because we find that out pretty much instantly,” she says. She started learning her lines on the day she found out that her brother had died. I ask her if it was difficult to do a piece about grief while she was grieving.

“Well, it’s an odd thing. I’m really very, very passionate and stringent about [the fact that] the character’s not you. Any crossover and I get quite irritated. The thing is that any feelings of grief that the character has, they’ll be experiencing them in a different way, and at a different time.” Obviously, she says, you use yourself to play a character. “But if you get too engaged with it, from a personal point of view, then it’s not really acting, is it?”

In Days of the Bagnold Summer, Dolan plays an introverted librarian with a large collection of pastel twinsets who starts to reassess her life. Though its contains all the ingredients that could be cooked up into a coming-of-age film about her teenage son, Daniel, it is very much Sue’s story, too; the way in which it splits our sympathies between them is quite beautiful, and certainly unusual.

When the film did the festival rounds, pre-lockdown, Dolan found that when the cast did Q&As, it was mostly older women who asked questions. “And you usually don’t get one woman asking. For some reason, unfortunately, we talk about these films like, ‘Oh it’s about a boy who ...’ Even the way that we talk about that shows how unbalanced it is. I think I read somewhere that the least likely person to appear on television is a 52-year-old woman from the north of England,” she says. “And they’re the most likely person to watch television.” 

In 2019, Dolan won an Olivier award for best supporting actress, for All About Eve in the West End. Awards make a difference, she says, if only because they open more doors. “Certainly after the Bafta, I think people are more interested to meet you. If I had to put it in a nutshell, when you’ve won an award, people thank you for coming on the way in, and if you haven’t won an award, people thank you for coming on the way out,” she laughs.

She is also a playwright – she took her one-woman show The B*easts to the Edinburgh festival fringe in 2017. Is she worried about the future of theatre, given that every day there seems to be a new story about the potential for financial ruin? “Of course it concerns me. But the thing that makes theatre theatre is that you’re all breathing in the same space. So we have to be safe to do that, as well. I think that possibly after this, people will need theatre more than ever, because that human connection will be what we’ve been craving. But my dearest hope is that we can keep going before that.”

Now that the early lockdown flurry of work has slowed, she is taking the time to write. “I have to say that, psychologically, I don’t feel like I’m in an enormous hurry to leave the house any quicker than anybody else,” she says, understandably. “I thought there’d be not a lot happening at this time. But it turns out pretty much everything has happened.”

• Days of the Bagnold Summer is available in the UK on demand from 8 June.