LINDA Bassett apologises that she might be a bit jet lagged having flown in from New York the morning of our interview.

“If I’m a bit weird you’ll know why,” she laughed.

Linda, best known to TV audiences for her role as the indomitable Nurse Phyllis Crane in the Sunday night series Call the Midwife, has just spent two weeks enthralling audiences in Brooklyn with the hit West End play Escaped Alone.

Now the acclaimed drama is to come to the Lowry, Salford Quays, featuring the original cast from the Royal Court Theatre.

Written by Caryl Churchill it sees three elderly women having a chat in their back garden on a sunny day. They invite a neighbour - played by Linda - to join them. The result is a thought-provoking, funny and fairly bleak vision involving friendship, secrets and the end of the world.

“It’s triple layered in a way,” said Linda. “You have got the garden with the women talking to each other, sharing the things of life in rather a warm and friendly way, then each of them has their interior conflicts and then finally there are all the catastrophes described by my character, Mrs Jarrett.

“It can be challenging but most people find it illuminating and useful in a funny way, particularly given the times we are living in.”

Linda’s performance as a modern-day apocalyptic sooth-sayer is just the latest role to get the critics raving about her acting prowess.

Now 67, she has been a regular at the National Theatre where, ironically, she once worked as a usherette, and at theatres across the West End. On the big screen she was nominated for A Bafta for East is East and on TV starred in the period drama Lark Rise to Candleford.

Escaped Alone premiered at the Royal Court last year and Linda is delighted to be reunited with her co-stars for a national tour.

“It is almost the ideal situation to let a play lie in the back of your brain for a year and then come back and rehearse it again with the same people,” she said. “We have all said it would be great it we could do this every time.

“We’ve been able to take it to another level in a way because we know each other and the script so well.

“When we were in America it was so very well received. We had people stopping us all over Manhattan saying how much they enjoyed the show.”

Escaped Alone is the fifth play by Caryl Churchill which Linda has been involved in. At less than an hour long but with dialogue which sees the cast often talking over each other or not finishing a sentence, it represents a great challenge for the actors.

“When we first started reading it through, we realised it was unusual,” said Linda.

“But the more we rehearsed it, more we started to talk like that and more we realised that people do talk like that, particularly with friends, because you assume that they will finish your sentence. and know what you are talking about.

“For an actor it’s more like a poem or piece of music.

“We’ve said we are more like a string quartet. You have to come in on time and share with each other. It’s not about actors’ egos.”

Although Linda is now one of our most respected actresses, she did not follow the traditional route into the profession through drama school.

“I haven’t got a stage school background but you would be surprised how many actors haven’t. I often feel we could form a whole little gang of our own, the people who have never been to drama school but are managing to have careers.”

Managing to have a career is something of an understatement in Linda’s case, particularly with the success of Call the Midwife.

Set in Poplar in the early Sixties, it follows a team of midwives in the East End.

“It’s a lovely show to be part of,” said Linda. “It’s a great company and everyone is really smashing.

“The scripts are wonderful they are always very challenging.

“It is much more hard hitting than people may at first realise and we are all very proud of that because it is not gratuitous telly. It looks at real situations and isn’t scared to tackle them.”

Linda’s character, Nurse Crane, is a Morris Minor driving spinster who keeps her younger proteges in check.

“I get to have enormous fun being bossy and then having a heart of gold as well,” she said. “And I can drive a Morris Minor because I used to have one.”

And Linda had good news for fans of the series.

“I’ll be having April off after Escaped Alone and then we will start filming the next series of Midwife,” she said.

Escaped Alone, the Lowry, Salford Quays, Tuesday, March 7 to Saturday, March 11. Details from 0843 208 6000