Rehearsal room four at the National Theatre is a windowless box about the size
of a squash court with stark strip lights and bare grey walls. In the middle
of it is a Formica-topped table and beside that sits Wendy Spon, the head of
casting, who spends days of her life in here and loathes the “grim,
claustrophobic, Eastern bloc feel of the place”.
Behind the table, motionless, is Nicholas Hytner, fêted supremo of the
National and a director on a 20-year winning streak that runs from Miss
Saigon via The Madness of George III to The History Boys
and beyond .
Facing them on a December afternoon last year was a terrified young actor
whose only previous professional experience at the National was as an usher.
If only John Heffernan knew: the part was his already.
This is the story of an everyday theatrical success, the tale of a promising
young actor on the verge of his big break. For the past three months The
Times has followed Heffernan, 26, from Billericay in Essex, as he
prepares for his first opening night at the National next Tuesday. He is
playing Stephen Undershaft, a strong supporting part in George Bernard
Shaw’s Major Barbara, directed by Hytner and starring Simon
Russell Beale and Clare Higgins, two of his heroes.
All actors feel a degree of fear but Heffernan was almost paralysed by it.
Every new stage is fraught with worry: the first rehearsal, acting with his
idols, the prospect of the critics. Nothing, however, has been as bad as the
audition.
“In my head the room was like an interrogation cell – tiny, tiny, really
minute,” he says. “I was trying not to think, ‘There’s Nick Hytner, the most
important man in British theatre’.
“But I was ultra-aware of him looking at me like a chess player or a hawk
sizing me up. He was friendly but quite still and had one hand up to his
mouth, waiting to be impressed. I was thinking, ‘He’s a very busy man who
has figured immediately that I’m the wrong person for the role and now he’s
trying, politely, to get rid of me’.”
Small talk about King Lear intended to relax the young actor had the opposite
effect. “I talked about playing Oswald, a minor part in Trevor Nunn’s
production with Ian McKellen. Nick Hytner talked about directing a very
famous version with John Wood and Ralph Fiennes for the RSC when I was 9.”
The whole agonising process lasted less than 15 minutes.
Only a tiny minority of young actors are anointed as stars from the start.
Kenneth Branagh walked straight into a lead role in the West End with Another
Countryafter graduating from RADA in 1982. Orlando Bloom was cast as
Legolas in The Lord of the Rings trilogy two days after leaving the
Guildhall School of Music & Drama. For the majority of their peers,
however, drama school is followed by years of “spear carrying” and bit parts
until a combination of luck, talent and character resolves their destiny one
way or the other.
The odds against making it are formidable. Equity, the actors’ union,
estimates that about 9,000 students graduate from accredited drama and
performing arts courses each year, with a similar number taking short-term
or nonaccredited courses. The National’s casting team see several thousand
performances by young actors every year but only a few dozen are cast.
Away from the stifling atmosphere of the audition room Heffernan comes across
far better: thoughtful but funny, his self-doubt expressed as a quick,
self-deprecating wit rather than chronic anxiety. The moustache he has grown
for the role lends his lean face a touch of Battle of Britain dash, even if
his girlfriend thinks it makes him look “like a cross between Leslie
Phillips and Adolf Hitler”. His career amounts to small parts in five RSC
productions and one television appearance, playing a tramp who is set on
fire in Holby Blue. He made the final two for a Barclays advert but
missed out. Hytner too is much warmer: a gossipy, charismatic impresario
spring-loaded with mischievous energy and restless curiosity. In rehearsal
he makes his cast laugh with an anecdote about a meeting with the Queen
(“Oh, are you the George III fellow?”) and compares Heffernan’s character to
pompous Cambridge undergraduates he knew who, “even in their twenties,
already acted like old Tories addressing the House of Lords”. He is highly
amused by Heffernan’s tortured recollection of their first meeting.
As he remembers it: “John came in and quite simply he got it. He hit it right
down the middle. It’s often a good sign if an audition is short. You
sometimes know as soon as they start to read and sometimes it’s after the
second reading when they have an idea of what you think makes the part tick.
If it’s just right, there’s no point in keeping the actor hanging around.”
Spon says that Hytner makes up his mind very quickly about actors, not just
because his time is precious but also “because he wants to move on to
working with them”.
She had met Heffernan twice before putting him in front of her boss. “I liked
John immediately and thought he was bright and that he would be able to do
Shaw,” she says. “You need to be able to think in long sentences because of
the way he uses language. It presents a particular challenge to young actors
who don’t do a lot of this kind of thing any more. I also thought he could
do posh, which is not very fashionable now. People who are class versatile
are few and far between.”
Heffernan decided to become an actor at Bristol University and studied at
Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he was instructed to
forget about becoming a classical actor. “I was told there’s only really the
RSC and the Globe so get that out of your head now.”
While he was at drama school he worked as an usher in the National for £4.50
an hour. Now a weekly wage of £390 (minus agents’ fees) is stretched over
the intense rehearsal schedules of the final weeks.
Backstage three weeks ago, and like every National production, Major
Barbara was taking shape on site. The scuffed lino floors and brightly
painted corridors feel like a hospital, albeit with photographs of actors
all over the walls. In one workshop, props staff sitting in front of giant
unfinished back-drops are churning out bombs made from cardboard tubes and
vacuum-formed plastic. Next door the cast are working without scripts for
the first time.
Rehearsal Room One is a bright, airy space the size of a school gymnasium with
the dimensions of the Olivier stage marked out in tape on the floor. There
is a piano in one corner that Russell Beale likes to play at lunchtime. A
long table off to one side is covered with research notes, including stapled
print-offs from Wikipedia on the Salvation Army and Chartism, the
19th-century radical movement. In the middle of the room an overstuffed
sofa, a writing table and a potted fern are arranged to suggest an Edwardian
library.
Hytner sits in front of this improvised set, flanked by his team of stage
managers, who note down everything he says. He interrupts the actors
constantly, leaning forward and jabbing the air with his pencil or
stretching back to act out a new idea.
Heffernan has two big scenes in the play. One is with Clare Higgins, the
triple Olivier award-winning actress, who plays his imperious, aristocratic
mother. Characteristically, he was almost swamped by fear when he met her at
the first rehearsal, although not as badly as at a recent read-through for a
film when, seeing Branagh, Bill Nighy and Jason Isaacs already there, he
locked himself in the lavatory for 20 minutes to avoid being introduced.
His other big moment is with Russell Beale. They had met once before, in 2002,
when Heffernan “had a two-minute scary fan conversation with him when he was
Uncle Vanya at the Donmar”.
For the first month he could only think of them “as their characters”.
Russell Beale sympathises. He is regularly touted as the greatest stage actor
of his generation but still finds the first day of rehearsals a trial. “It’s
nerve-racking, as is the first preview and the first time you walk out of
the rehearsal room on to the Olivier stage. Every single time, you have to
start again.”
With opening night coming sharply into focus, Heffernan can see the end of the
tunnel now. He has his own dressing room for the first time, with a single
bed, a desk, a rat trap and a radio that can be tuned to the Olivier
theatre, the Lyttelton theatre, the Cottesloe theatre or Capital FM.
At last he feels part of the group and is secretly delighted that Hytner and
Russell Beale have started to tease him in front of the rest of the cast.
(When he wore reading glasses at the last run through, Hytner said: “A new
prop at this stage? That’s really quite daring for someone doing their first
play at the National.”) He has also been cast in another National play – The
Revenger’s Tragedy – which sets him dreaming about the future.
Typically, his most fanciful ambition is not to play Lear or Hamlet but
Richard II, the gentle, inadequate king who is overthrown by a more
charismatic rival.
“But my real hope is just to stay in work. If not it could be back to
ushering, though it is a little awkward selling ice-creams to people you
were rehearsing with a few weeks ago.”
Treading the boards
Major Barbara works tirelessly for the poor at a Salvation Army shelter until
a large but morally dubious donation is welcomed from her estranged father,
a millionaire weapons manufacturer. But when she visits the factory, the
well-fed workers in their thriving model town make a devastating case for
arms trade profits and a whole new set of ideals.
The play is part of the Travelex £10 tickets season and opens on Tuesday at
the National Theatre.
The cast in Major Barbara includes:
Name John Heffernan
Playing Stephen Undershaft
Age 26
Education Comprehensive in Essex; Bristol University; Webber Douglas
Academy of Dramatic Art
Career Five small roles for RSC; one TV appearance in Holby Blue
Critical verdict “A young talent to watch” The Sunday
Times
Name Simon Russell Beale
Playing Andrew Undershaft (Stephen’s father)
Age 47
Education Clifton College in Bristol; Cambridge University; Guildhall
School of Music & Drama
Career Three Olivier awards; one Bafta; associate of the National and
Almeida theatres; associate artist of the RSC, CBE.
The critics say “Perhaps the greatest stage actor of his generation” (The
New York Times)
Name Clare Higgins
Playing Lady Britomart Undershaft (Stephen’s mother)
Age 52
Education Expelled from convent school in Leeds; Lamda
Career Three Olivier awards (for Vincent in Brixton; Sweet
Bird of Youth, and Hecuba; Films include Hellraiser
and The Golden Compass
The critics say “A national treasure” The Times
