Moody, exciting, godlike, genius, passionate, brilliant, tired, lost, sexy,
troubled, caring, disillusioned, frightening, complex. Those words, scrawled
on a wall of the dingy South London hall where Douglas Hodge is rehearsing
his revival of Athol Fugard's Dimetos, are what the cast free-associated
when he asked them to describe the title-character. But wouldn't some of
them also apply to the actor playing the part, Jonathan Pryce?
It's up to his family and friends to say if he is lost or troubled. Moody?
Well, he's had to fight the melancholy that, since he's Welsh, he regards as
a malign birthright. But the female consensus is that he's sexy and at
various moments in our interview he sounds caring, disillusioned and
passionate. Tired, too, at least when it comes to the prospect of tackling
another big musical, such as Miss Saigon or Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the
Broadway musical in which he gave his most recent stage performance.
Godlike is going it a bit, though it's time that, like his close contemporary
Antony Sher, he was elevated to the cloud from which theatrical knights peer
down at mortals. On the screen he has played Juan Perón opposite Madonna in
the film of Evita and the anti-heroic Sam Lowry in Brazil, and on the stage
his roles have varied from an Olivier-award-winning Hamlet to Professor
Higgins in My Fair Lady at the National. At 61, he's one of the top two or
three actors of his generation: possibly genius, undeniably brilliant,
certainly exciting.
Frightening, too, when need be. Back in 1975 he made his name performing a
raging comic in Trevor Griffiths's Comedians and he has played a
megalomaniac mogul in the Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies. Myself, I'll never
forget entering the Royal Shakespeare Theatre for The Taming of the Shrew,
only to see members of the audience cowering from a crazed figure running
riot in the stalls and then jumping onstage and pulling down the set. It was
Pryce, giving a sneak preview of his ferocious Petruchio.
But let's not forget the key word, complex. Pryce has mellowed since what he
has called his angry-young-man days and grown tired of critical tags such as
“coiled menace”. After all, that melodic voice and long, bony, haunted face
are pretty adaptable. He has been that notably unscary figure, Lytton
Strachey, in the film Carrington, and Keira Knightley's respectable father
in Pirates of the Caribbean. Isn't his talent and career pretty hard to sum
up? “Yes,” he says, “and in lots of ways that's a blessing. I've been able
to move from comedic to villain to music to tragedy and sometimes music and
tragedy, because it can be tragic the way you're singing.”
Pryce is given to wry, self-deprecating remarks like that. But the reason he
doesn't see himself doing another major musical isn't the quality of his
voice. There are those who still remember him singing at the first-night
party for the RSC's Macbeth in which he played the tyrant, with Simon
Russell Beale on the piano and the witches providing backing. And he has
succeeded as the sleazy Engineer in Miss Saigon, Fagin in Oliver! and
Higgins in the revival of My Fair Lady famous for the absences of Martine
McCutcheon and her understudies - and for the evening when a frustrated
Pryce went onstage and invited members of the audience to apply for the role
of Eliza.
No, his reason for renouncing musicals is that he left Dirty Rotten
Scoundrels, in which he played the suave conman Lawrence Jamieson, feeling
his age. “I suppose it was the way I chose to do it. It turned into
two-and-a-half hours of energetic running about the stage, larking and
leaping about, running up and down stairs, and I ended up doing my tendons,
my ankles and my knees. Perhaps I could still cope with My Fair Lady, but
only if I had one Eliza at a time.”
Dimetos, which involves a gifted engineer who abandons the city for a remote
village, only to fall destructively in love with his niece, is a very
different challenge. Pryce was sent the script by the Donmar, where it opens
on Wednesday, and thought the writing extraordinary but the play baffling.
Friends who read it agreed that it was well written but had no idea what it
was about. But then came a meeting with Hodge, who communicated his passion
for the play: “I decided to do it because I wanted to understand it fully
myself - and I'm finding it the most difficult thing I've done in years.”
Difficult because, though short, it is concentrated, and because Dimetos's
thoughts and feelings change very quickly. And difficult because Pryce has
found the lines so tough to learn that he envies Richard Dreyfuss, who
needed electronic prompting to get through his recent role at the Old Vic.
“I'm reassured that there's a spare earpiece knocking round London,” he
says. “Actors of a certain age are queuing up to use it and I think it might
be my turn.”
Difficult but rewarding. The more Pryce has worked on Dimetos, the clearer it
has seemed. Reading Fugard's notebooks and diaries has helped too. The play
dates from 1975 and possibly reflects the dramatist's feelings about what
had become an enervating struggle against apartheid. “Dimetos has had enough
of doing worthy charity work and giving in to other people's needs, and
rather selfishly takes himself off to the mountains. It was Fugard's way of
saying ‘I'm tired of my commitment to the political situation in South
Africa'.”
Pryce has been wary of talking about his personal life since he insisted that
his wife, the actress Kate Fahy, be included in the photo of him and their
new baby meant to accompany a newspaper interview, only for an editor to
chop her out. All he'll say about his two sons and daughter is that “they're
healthy and happy”.
Actually, the big news in his private life is that he's joined a life-class
and, for the first time in aeons, started to draw. “At first it was agony. I
came out with my head aching and my shoulders locked because of the tension.
But that was because I was carrying things from art college about being
judged. It took me time to realise I wasn't in a classroom - and I began to
enjoy it a lot.”
Pryce left that classroom for that college when he was 16, planning to become
a teacher, after being brought up in Holywell, Clwyd, where his father,
formerly a coal miner, had opened a grocery shop. A performance in a college
production gave him the acting bug and, soon, a scholarship to RADA. He'd
seldom been to London before, was pretty insecure, and wasn't helped by the
teacher who told him that he'd end up playing nobody but villains in Z-Cars
on television. But he prospered, honing his craft at the Everyman in
Liverpool, where, he recalls, “you'd be doing a straight play, then
Shakespeare, then some kind of rock musical - it gave you confidence, made
you fearless”.
Then came Comedians, a transfer to New York, a Tony Award and encounters with
the famous Strasbergs, whom he came to dislike and whose Method he still
mistrusts. He thought Lee self-absorbed, cruel and happiest when he was
forcing vulnerable young actors to recall some emotional trauma, and he
appalled Stella when she proudly told him that Al Pacino was doing a “caged
animal exercise” when he was imprisoned with his hostages during the bank
robbery in Dog Day Afternoon. Pryce asked why he didn't imagine he was in a
bank with some hostages - “and she looked at me as if I was mad”.
Pryce doesn't wholly reject Method thinking - when he played Hamlet, he was
grieving for his father, who had died after being battered by a teenage
robber - but he prefers British ways. He likes to talk and talk about a play
with his director and fellow actors and do whatever research the role
demands, for instance learning the relevant physics for the role of Dimetos.
Then he relies on his own instincts and the situation onstage. When, in
2004, his director asked him what he would be thinking about when he played
Albee's Goat, a play about a man who has an affair with the mammal of the
title, his answer was simple: “I'll be thinking of f***ing a goat.”
Indeed, he's notably unpretentious when it comes to talking about his
techniques and, paradoxically, quotes Lee Strasberg in his defence. “I said:
‘Mr Strasberg, I have to perform this role eight times a week. Do you have
any tips on how to approach a long run?' And he said: ‘You do it', and bit
into his sandwich and chewed, and said: ‘It's your job'. It was probably the
most practical advice anyone could give an actor.”
Pryce is impatient with people who don't think that acting is hard, intense
work and has little time for the cult of celebrity, adding: “God, I'll get
killed for saying this, but it's probably the least talented people who have
the most celebrity.” And he remains in demand on both stage and screens of
every size. Last year the sitcom Clone, in which he played a
Frankenstein-like scientist, didn't have the hoped-for success, but this
summer he'll be seen playing the US president in a Hollywood blockbuster
called GI Joe, which involves assorted superheroes, mainly the American
counterpart of our Action Man.
Pryce is, he says, in his “cameo period” as far as films are concerned. That's
good news for playgoers, for he isn't contemplating a cameo period in the
theatre, a medium he prefers anyway, since “once you're onstage you're your
own focus-puller, editor and boss”. He'll be appearing in Pinter's Caretaker
in a return to the Everyman in Liverpool in the autumn, though there are no
clear plans for anything after that. Lear, which he has sometimes mentioned
as a possibility? “Well, I keep wondering and I haven't done any Shakespeare
since Macbeth in 1986. But there's been a glut of Lears recently, hasn't
there?”
Yes, but when I interviewed him five years ago, didn't he say that he was
thinking of giving up acting at 60? But at the time he was feeling
frustrated by the roles he was being offered and the prospect of retiring
was, he explains, a sort of dream. But the question brings him back to
Dimetos, one of whose big secrets is that he's simply stopped caring. “You
get to 60 and you think: ‘Why do I keep on, do I really care any more? Do I
care enough to do a play at the Donmar rather than staying at home?'
“Well, I do. I haven't been able to give it up and I don't want to. As long as
there's a theatre industry, given our massive financial problems, I'll keep
on working.”
Dimetos is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (www.donmarwarehouse.com; 0870
0606624), to May 9
