Rebecca Barry: Conquer away, just leave out the stooping

It's hard to believe it's the Westie. Antonia Prebble, the actress behind bratty brains Loretta in Outrageous Fortune, has transformed into an elegant lady in red, elocution just so, manner dignified, nerves - if there are any during her stage debut with the Auckland Theatre Company - indiscernible.

It's opening night of Anglo-Irish favourite She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith, and the play has been transported from the stuffy 18th century to the 1950s. Prebble is Kate, an upper-class beauty in pursuit of a man who becomes tongue-tied around such women. Kate resorts to act like Fortune's Pascalle - thrusting her assets, broadening her accent and presenting herself as an enthusiastic sex object to win him over.

It works, the deception is exposed and they get what they deserve: each other, status and all. She stoops, she conquers.

Prebble makes it easy to see the funny side of this class-crossing act, as do the other excellent cast members as they throw a fresh spin on the classic case of mistaken identity.

Afterwards, it was comforting to think the social hierarchy Goldsmith satirises is not so prevalent today. But as we laughed at Marlow's snobbishness, another Kate in the world was stooping to conquer while managing to sound completely snobby. Self-designated woman-of-the-people Kate Winslet, the anti-airbrushing heroine, tried a little too hard to convince us of her normality when she was interviewed in the latest Marie Claire.

If we just put aside her Oscar-winning talent for a second, off camera the once down-to-earth actress has become desperate and patronising. E! Channel fans will have rolled their eyes at the clip in which she's interviewed on the red carpet, gushing her amazement that all this success has happened "to someone like me".

What she means, as painfully reiterated in the latest magazine, is a working-class girl like me. Winslet is apparently sick of being mistaken for a child of the privileged middle classes, a terrible affliction that would have caused her life to have been marginally easier, her rise to the top a little less impressive. In the process she has managed to embarrass her family, describing them as "a Joe Orton farce", and suggesting she has been misrepresented because she "speaks nice".

Why she felt the need to stoop to conquer is beyond anyone who has seen her stunning performances in both The Reader and Revolutionary Road. Perhaps she's concerned her latest successes will put a distance between her and those who contribute to her upper-class lifestyle. Maybe it doesn't suit her image as the "real woman" - how can anyone with such lovely diction be real, play real?

But every time she proclaims this incredible self-possession in the face of horrible holidays at Cornwall, she chips away at it. Somehow it makes her narcissistic, insecure.

Winslet isn't the only star guilty of stooping to conquer, an act that has come to mean compromising your true self to achieve a higher goal. Susan Boyle, the surprisingly good singer of Britain's Got Talent, has succumbed to industry pressure and had a makeover.

Perhaps it was inevitable and deserving for the Scottish singer, whose dowdy image does little to advertise her talent.

But surely even Boyle knows her phenomenal popularity this year didn't have everything to do with the way she sings. Must she stoop to expectation when she could conquer as herself?

She has more than enough talent to convince the world of that, bushy eyebrows and all. She's obviously been quite happy with those eyebrows for a long time.

Another, less obvious example: the women of Kenya are midway through a sex ban imposed to illuminate the violence plaguing their country's elections. They hope to improve relations between Kenya's feuding coalition partners by not putting out for seven days.

The protest has been hailed as a bold way for the women of Kenya to push for reform. In a country where campaigning is a particularly dangerous task, women must look for alternative ways in which to voice their opinions. They've even offered to pay the country's sex workers to join the strike.

The activists hope the campaign will promote a stronger sense of sacrifice, one that they too are suffering after all. But there's no escaping the women are stooping by presenting themselves as sex objects whose power lies in the bedroom.

You have to admire them and hope that it works. Then perhaps stooping to conquer wouldn't be such a bad thing after all.