Which practitioners/directors have had the greatest influence upon your work, and why? |
| When I left Drama School the first Director I worked with is a director called Max Stafford Clarke who I guess had an enormous influence on me in the way that he works. He does a thing, it’s quite difficult to explain, he breaks down the scripts in a very specific way. He takes certain lines and adds transitive verbs to them so you’re performing an action, so every line you deliver you are trying to affect the other person, so you use words like prompt or cajoles or these kinds of words so you become very specific about what you are saying to the other person. I’ve worked with various directors who have had a big influence but he was the first guy I’d worked with as a professional theatre actor and that was a huge thing for me. I just think he is fantastic, I don’t use that method all the time but it’s an incredibly helpful thing to use when you are struggling, and it’s a wonderful technique. So he is one of them but I’ve worked with Nick Hightner at the National Theatre which was a great experience and Howard Davis and Jonathan Camfol (?) I’ve worked with them and they are all fabulous. I think you learn something new every time you work with a director, a different director, because everyone has their own vision of how it works. |
| What was your initial approach to the text and character? |
| Well, I’ve know the play for a long time; I’ve known it for years. I saw it when David Suchet and Michael Sheen did it at the Old Vic. So I’ve know the play for a long time and I’ve always loved the character of Mozart. And I guess, it’s early days so I don’t really know how I’m approaching it. But I guess with a character like Mozart you just have to dive in and try lots of stuff out and see what works and what doesn’t work. It’s a very physical part so you have to be free enough to try things out, jump around and then later on you start to chop away at what you’ve done and get a more defined performance. For this character you have to push it as far as you can and then pull it back. |
| The Crucible is a wonderful, yet unusual space to create a piece of work for. How will you prepare for a performance in such a space, what do you need to take into consideration and has the space affected your approach to the play? |
| Because the audience is around it on three sides you have to be aware that in order for everyone to see every thing you are doing the best way to work the stage is to be constantly on the move. Where with a pros you have to play outwards. The great thing about the Crucible stage is that you don’t feel bound by where the audience is because they are all around you. It frees you up a lot so you can move round the stage and try lots of different stuff out so you don’t have to be so constantly aware of sending it out to the audience. So it’s a great stage to work on and once you get used to it because as theatrical actors you are conditioned to perform in a certain way, or at least your ideas of where you should be on the stage is very definite if you are doing it in pros. But it’s a great thing for just letting go and running around.
You always have to warm up your voice before you go on; because you are making demands you wouldn’t normally. So a 20 minute warm up – you warm up your voice like you would warm up your body if you were doing some sport. It’s the same thing, because otherwise you would hurt yourself.
For this I will do a physical workshop. It depends on the part, if you are not doing a lot of movement in the ply you don’t necessarily need to warm your body up that much. But with this it will take quite a lot I think because there is a lot of physicality in it. Each time you do a different character, I think, you have to modify the way you work. |
| Although the play’s name sake is Amadeus Mozart, Mozart and the events within the play are always seen through the eyes of Antonio Salieri’s memory, 34 years after Mozart’s death and therefore our perception is always coloured by him. How does this effect your portrayal of Mozart? |
We had a discussion about whether or not the play is specifically Salieri’s vision of what happened and his version of events. There is no way to play that really. All I’m trying to do is play Mozart as written in the script. There would be no way for me to… it would be a strange thing to do to play him as if he is a figment of someone else’s imagination, although I have done that when I did Lear, I played a ghost but he’s not real he’s a figment of Lear’s imagination. But you have to play it as real as possible because otherwise it doesn’t work. All you characters always have to one foot in reality even if they are fantastical. Because an audience has to believe.
Yes the play is Salieri’s version of events, but there is a lot of other stuff in there, the characters are very real and very in and of themselves. It’s just playing the part. |
| Amadeus revolves around the dramatic interpretation and relationship between the historical figures: Antonio Salieri and Amadeus Mozart. What do you take into consideration when portraying historic people and events? What research have you done and how much creative licence do you feel is allowable? |
| The play isn’t entirely historically accurate; he’s taken a lot of artistic licence in various places. The suggestion that Salieri was in some way behaving like he was is stretching the truth a little bit. There are various versions of events, various historians have said different things and there are lots of conspiracy theories. I have been doing research, I’ve got a lot of books on Mozart and I’ve been reading his letters, which a lot of the script is based on, Mozart playing with words and the obscenities that come out of him are in the letters. Also just listening to lots and lots of his music that’s the main thing. I use music a lot. You know that thing where you listen to a song that you haven’t heard for years and it reminds you of that boyfriend or girlfriend you had, that summer that you had, and it immediately gives you an emotional kind of zing. So if I’m doing a part, if it’s theatre or tv or film or whatever, I’ll usually listen to a lot of music, I’ll have play lists and things like that, which I use to get me into the vibe. It’s great with this because I just listen to a lot of Mozart, which is no bad thing. |
| Can you describe Mozart’s relationship with Constanze? |
| It’s a stormy relationship, very passionate and playful but also they have these fantastic rows. Mozart is a difficult guy, he’s kind of like a rock star in that respect. It’s everything at once, he’s very kind of present. He has all these ideas zinging round his head and she’s the only one who kind of gets his playfulness. Everyone else things it obnoxious but she finds that side of him wonderful. But it’s just one of those stormy, stormy relationships but it works. Mozart cheats on her but she forgives him and she comes back every time, so the are very much in love, because they are they only people who understand each other. I think that’s why they stay together for so long. |
| Mozart’s father Leopold is a key figure and influence on the young composer. How have you interpreted this relationship? |
| Like I say I’ve been reading letters and it’s true that at about 6 Mozart went on tour with his father and sister. They toured around all the great courts of Europe and spent several months on the road. It’s wasn’t like travelling these days, they were in horse and carriages and it was taking them days and weeks to get to various places and he was kind of paraded around. Of course his father loves him but he is very much aware that he is almost like an investment. There is a story actually, he and Mozart and his wife and daughter were staying in a house and there was an outbreak of smallpox and some of the people in the house they were staying in developed smallpox. So the father took Mozart and moved him and Mozart out to another house, and left the daughter and mother behind because he knew that Mozart was a genius and that he had to protect him. He’s father was incredibly overbearing and all through his life he used to write disapproving letters to Mozart. So Mozart was terrified of this father figure. This comes out in the play, he won’t marry Constanze without his father’s consent, even though he’s 26 and the consent doesn’t matter. When he has his childish outbursts he then remembers that his father would tell him off for behaving like that. He’s always a shadowy figure hanging over Mozart’s lie which is true if you read the letters its true his father was very reproachful. Mozart was a pain in the ass but he was a genius as well. |
| What Arts work did you do at school? |
I was always involved in school plays and drama class etc. But originally I trained to be a classical dancer. So I was always doing things outside of class as well ballet classes and stuff like that. Eventually, when I was 12 my dance teacher said I should go away and do it at a school so I left Carlisle and went to Surrey and did ballet.
Up to twelve I went to comprehensive school. At 12 I went to the ballet school, but what you would have is an afternoon or morning of normal work then the rest of the day would be spent dancing. It was a good education as well as dancing. But I quickly realised when I got there dancing wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. |
| After leaving school, what training did you take? |
| I went to Art College after I left ballet school and did a Performing Arts BETEC. Then I took a year out to earn enough money to go to drama school and I did 3 years at LAMDA. |
| How did you get your “big break”? |
| I started acting when I was 14 when I was at ballet school. What happened was there was a very, very good director called Adrian Shergold, who came round and was auditioning kids to play a character called Henry Pratt in a thing called The Life and Times of Henry Pratt which was a four part drama for Granada at the time. I got the part I started doing that then I did a few more jobs while I was still a kid. Then I gave it up when I left Ballet school and concentrated on studying and I wasn’t acting. Then I didn’t really do any professional work until I left drama school in 2000. As for big break I don’t really know, I don’t think I’ve had one, I’m kind of of the opinion that I just want to keep working. I’d rather just have a nice long career than have a big break. |
| What does a typical day consist of? |
If I’m not working I try and find things to fill my day. If I am working it depends entirely on what the job is. I can tell you a typical day on this. I get up have my breakfast; come to rehearsals about 9.30 am. Then we just work slowly through the script, putting it together scene by scene by scene.
If I’m doing television and film you get picked up considerably earlier, about 6.00 am. Driven to set, and then you do a 12 hour day sometimes.
Some years you will have 5/6 months of working, maybe less. This year I’ve been working pretty much no stop, the last 2 years have been great. But it can vary widely. But that is why it is exciting as well because you don’t know where you are going to be; because one week you could be sitting in your flat not doing much the next you could be in South Africa. It can happen that quickly, it has happened to me before, that I’ve been up for a job didn’t think much of it because I haven’t heard about it for a couple of weeks then I get a phone call saying you’ve got the part, in one instance, you are going to travel to Mexico next week. So I had to pack all my stuff and travel to Mexico, and I was there for 6 months. So that’s what is exciting about it but also what’s frustrating about it, it’s difficult to make plans. |
| Is it a busy life? |
| No, not all the time. Sometimes it is but again it varies widely. But you are always going for auditions and things like that. |
| How do you feel your work has changed or developed? |
| I think every job you do things change a little bit. Every director works differently, every actor works slightly differently and you are surrounded, especially in this, I’m surrounded by people who have being doing it for years, the older guys in it are all fantastic and come from a tradition that we have lost. A lot of them were doing rep theatre. So I think you are always learning. I think that’s the main thing, which is why I think the big break thing, I think there is no point of arrival for an actor. There is not point where you can sit back and think now I’ve done it, because, what does that mean? If you’ve played Hamlet then what you just say I’ve played Hamlet so I can kill myself? |
