FOR Edinburgh-born actor Nicola Roy, as for so many other thespians, the Covid-19 pandemic brought a successful stage career to a very abrupt halt.

Just prior to the first UK-wide lockdown in March last year, Roy had been in Australia for five weeks performing in Liz Lochhead’s celebrated, one-hour adaptation of the satirical comedy Tartuffe by the French bard Molière.

The production received the coveted Critics’ Choice Award at the Adelaide Festival and was set for a Scotland-wide tour. The show had started its life at Glasgow’s lunchtime theatre A Play, A Pie And A Pint, and had been the toast of the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe.

However, barely had Roy, Lochhead and the rest of the company returned from their Australian triumph than the playhouses were shuttered and the tour put very emphatically on hold. Like most people across the theatre industry, the actor began having conversations about what she could do creatively while live drama was suspended.

In the midst of this brainstorming, producer Stephen Dunn (who was a co-producer on Tartuffe) suggested to Roy that, given her famed love of conversation, she consider doing a podcast. Not only that, but he had the audio equipment needed to make a professional job of it.

“I’d never thought about doing a podcast at all,” Roy says. “But I felt very excited by it.

“I have earned the nickname in some theatrical companies of ‘social secretary’, because I love an event. I love nothing more than bringing people together.”

The actor’s excitement led her to the door of David Greig, playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. Roy has a long association with the Edinburgh company and Greig’s support led to The Cultural Coven, a podcast produced by In Motion Theatre Company in association with the Lyceum Theatre and the Stephen Dunn Theatre Fund.

The basis for the show is that Roy interviews leading figures in Scottish cultural life. The actor-turned-presenter is fortunate, she says, “to have wonderful friends” in the Scottish arts who agreed to “take a leap of faith” and be interviewed by her for the podcast.

Those friends include singer-songwriter, radio presenter and Deacon Blue frontman Ricky Ross, fellow actor Elaine C Smith, author Ian Rankin and, of course, her good pal, playwright, poet and Scotland’s former Makar Liz Lochhead. With that kind of line-up, it should come as little surprise that The Cultural Coven has garnered considerable media attention.

FOR example, Lochhead’s always refreshing honesty led to headlines when she told Roy that the examiners at the Scottish Qualifications Agency were “absolute idiots” in their selection of her work. While overlooking her early poem The Choosing, which teenagers adore, she said, the examiners chose instead work that was more relevant to middle-aged women who were “victims of the dating game”.

Another high-profile friend who came on the show was Outlander star and whisky entrepreneur Sam Heughan. Roy and Heughan go way back to their days as founder members of the Lyceum Youth Theatre.

The appearance of Heughan on The Cultural Coven led to massive interest from Outlander fans, and thence to coverage in Hello! magazine. As the Heughan interview attracted increasing levels of attention, Roy became a little apprehensive about how the Outlander star’s legion of followers would judge her interview.

As it turned out, she needn’t have worried. “They were really lovely,” she recalls.

“They said I got things out of Sam that they had never heard before, and that I didn’t ask the slightly disrespectful questions that sometimes can be asked.”

Wonderful though the feedback has been for her interview with Heughan, Roy’s most embarrassing moment in making the podcasts also came during her conversation with him. Prior to doing the interview friends had dared the presenter to ask the actor out on a friend’s behalf and, even, to ask him to marry her.

Roy told Heughan this in the course of their chit-chat, to which the actor replied, ‘I’m waiting for this marriage proposal.’ “I had no comeback,” Roy remembers with shame.

“I pride myself on a good comeback, but I reverted to the vocabulary of a 15-year-old and said, ‘I’m taking a beamer!’”

If this self-deprecating anecdote proves anything, it is that, based on the world of the arts though it is, Roy’s podcast has more in common with The Graham Norton Show than it does with a self-consciously artsy programme, such as Front Row on Radio 4. “It was really important to cover various genres within the arts,” Roy explains.

“I wanted it to have something for everyone. I’m aware that you can say ‘it’s a podcast about the arts’, and that can sound like you have to be a Guardian reader to appreciate it.

“But that’s just not the case. Hopefully, we’ve made it accessible.

“It’s green room chat, I set the guests a creative challenge, I do some quickfire questions.”

THOSE quick-fire questions include a “yes” or “no” to Scottish independence. So far, Roy, says, every single guest has answered “yes”.

This doesn’t surprise the presenter, who is an ardent supporter of an independent Scotland herself. “The nature of the arts requires us to be pretty robust,” she says.

Artists are constantly shifting from job to job, she continues. They are “probably less scared of change” than the average citizen, as a consequence.

Add to that the much-vaunted “liberalism” of the arts, which Roy thinks is reflected in generally progressive political attitudes among artists, and it shouldn’t surprise us that indy has made a clean sweep among her podcast guests thus far.

Now that the vaccination programme is beginning to bear fruit and an eventual return to the stage is on the horizon, will Roy be exiting The Cultural Coven? “I actually don’t want to leave the podcast now,” she replies.

“I’m very much an actress first and foremost, but I think there is a hunger to know more about artists. Hopefully, I can have a podcast going alongside my acting work.”

The Cultural Coven can be accessed through the Lyceum Theatre’s website or podcast platforms lyceum.org.uk