Samuel West is the brooding pin-up boy of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He's also a train-spotter, a stamp collector, and one of a very long line of actors. As his Hamlet reaches London, he talks to Rebecca Tyrrel
04 Dec 2001
THERE are flames flickering invitingly in the open fireplace of Sam West's sitting-room. But no, on we go, along a wooden corridor, down some stairs, past an open bedroom door, and into a distinctly chilly small dining-room with a pristine Americana-style juke-box in the corner and a table in the middle with a plate of prettily arranged Jaffa Cakes on it. 'Have a Jaffa Cake,' says Sam, and then, before I have time to decline, adds, 'Your office sent me a marvellous folder of your articles but I confess that what with Hamlet and the Galapagos I have yet to read them so I don't know what you are expecting from me or what your approach will be. I am normally a stickler for research, so please understand this is very unusual.'<><><><><><><><>
Snappy dresser: Samuel West
The Galapagos? Sam West recently went there for two weeks on holiday. Hamlet? The 35-year-old has been playing a highly acclaimed Prince in Steven Pimlott's Royal Shakespeare Company production since March. The play has been performed in Stratford and Newcastle upon Tyne, and on 11 December it will start its London run at the Barbican theatre. On 9 January 2002 Sam West will have given his 100th performance of Hamlet.Hamlet, he thinks, in the light of the 11 September attacks, is a good play for the moment. 'On Saturday 15 September when the shock had worn off and the deep looking into ourselves had begun, we did a performance that was one of the most remarkable things I have ever been part of. Of course Hamlet is a debate about the nature and morality of revenge, and whether it is right to do something to assuage your angry feelings. It asks a lot of questions, the most famous of them being "To be or not to be", but there are no easy answers, we wouldn't be doing the play if there were, we would have answered them years ago. But there were all those people in the audience, sitting next to each other with their timeless worries.'Here in his Islington flat, away from the stage, talking about contemporary events, he still sounds very actorly and once or twice throughout the interview I think he does actually say 'ac-taw' in the way that people do if they are parodying 'ac-taws'. His voice comes from deep within and he enunciates - oh, how he enunciates.It is odd to have an interviewee apologise for their lack of research, and I would quite like to own up to the fact that I haven't been able to do that much on Sam West. The reason I don't confess is that in the very few articles that have been written about him he sounds quite scary and rather spoilt, and I don't want to upset him unnecessarily. I've already had the worry of being half an hour late because I was held up in traffic. In fact, he couldn't have been nicer about it. In fact, he couldn't have been nicer generally, or more welcoming or hospitable.
'I can talk for England,' he says and, as I was to find out during the five hours it took to transcribe this interview, Sam West does talk a great deal. But it doesn't matter that he uses several million words where he could have used ten because he is lovely to listen to - that ac-taw's voice curling around the room like toffee-flavoured air freshener.| Snappy dresser: Samuel West |
The other enjoyable thing about him is the pair of tight blond curls which dangle over his forehead. They are intriguing; more perfect than doll's curls and in stark contrast to his rather pointy face which becomes rounded when he smiles. Sam West has the most inviting smile; like his curls, it is quite girlish and very endearing.
'The toughest interview I have ever had,' he says, when I mention that he does not seem to fare terribly well with journalists, 'was with a woman from the Guardian. It was very horrid and I don't know what I did to upset her. I don't think I was in a very good mood. I had a cold and I think I was nervous about opening or something.' The interview he is referring to was a two-hander with his father, the actor Timothy West, to promote a production of Henry IV Parts I and II with the father as Falstaff and the son playing Hal.
'I was miserable,' says Sam, proffering the Jaffa Cakes again, 'because we were in a miserable production and I was cross about it. When you are in a bad production there are two things you can do. You can do your best or you can leave. I chose to do the third thing which was sulk.'
Didn't that make life difficult for your colleagues and your father?
'No,' replies Sam after a long, long pause which he breaks with such barking suddenness that I jump. 'If I was sulking as Hamlet it would affect my colleagues. If I was sulking as Hal, it doesn't quite do the same thing because there is a very definite job which is called leading the company. It is nothing to do with being a leading actor or even really the size of the part although in the case of Hamlet... [another long thoughtful pause full of actorly sighs and teeth sucking] it is something to do with the company being with you. It is not about ego or about non-egalitarianism, in fact it is quite the opposite. But somebody has to be in charge and in Hamlet, Hamlet is in charge.'
There is something about Sam West that makes me think that whoever he were playing - even if he were playing poor Yorick - he would still be in charge. It's a combination of charisma (which he vehemently denies having; he says his parents don't have it either, although his mother, Prunella Scales, is 'a very beautiful woman') and a dogged seriousness about his profession ('Like Hamlet I think too much').
He also seems to want to make everything just right, as he demonstrates when, after half an hour or so we move upstairs, driven out of the small dining-room by the chill. I perch on the edge of a large rose-coloured corduroy sofa in front of the open sitting-room fire (actually gas logs), and he asks me if I would like a cushion. 'No, no, I'm fine thank you,' I say, but before I have finished speaking I am having a large creamy cushion tucked into the small of my back. It is a very charming and friendly gesture but quite controlling.
The dogged seriousness which is part of his character shone through in 1992 when he played Leonard Bast in the film Howards End alongside Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson. It is the role for which most people remember him, and when the film came out in America Sam was tipped as the newest member of the then burgeoning Britpack - a Hugh Grant-ish, floppy-haired British type. But it never happened. 'No, no, it didn't happen at all,' he says, staring rather melodramatically at his feet. 'This is a regret, I suppose, in my life, not because I hanker after the fame or the lifestyle or the money, but it would have been nice to have been established in that way. But the thing about the Hugh Grant-ish type is that there already is this Hugh Grant-ish type called Hugh Grant.'
The sitting-room is huge and airy with a sage-green chaise-longue, the sofa, a 1930s walnut radio case and a poster for a Marx Brothers' film ('my heroes'). Sam says he has never given an interview in his flat before and that he is glad of my visit because it has made him tidy up. The flat is chock-full of stuff, reminiscent of Laurence Olivier's house in Sleuth, full of geegaws and novelties: 'I am a great collector,' he says.
His walls are loaded with things which are in turn loaded with significance, like the crown he wore to play Richard II last year when he first joined the RSC, and a publicity poster of him in that production. There are, too, a Ralph Steadman caricature of Damon Albarn scribbled on a scrap of table cloth; and displayed in the loo a receipt for cocaine signed by Dr Crippen, bought from a shop in the Strand; and on the stairs a signed photograph of the 1970s band Sparks ('my heroes').
Sam tells me that when other boys were becoming interested in girls he was train-spotting - and worse. He points to a drawer by the side of the fireplace and says it is full of stamps which he has been collecting since he was five, when he lived in the family home in Wandsworth with his father, his mother, and his younger brother Joe (who lives in France with his wife and two children). 'Stamps from Afghanistan are hilarious,' he says. 'You can tell when the revolutions are because suddenly they stop having pictures of the mullahs and the independence monument and they start having fish on them.'
Continuing the tour of the flat we once again move downstairs where, in a glass-fronted bookcase in the dining-room, is a collection of 'Dungeons and Dragons' books. In another bookcase is a collection of Play Pictorial magazines, bound into book form, which belonged to Peter Cushing ('one of my heroes'). One day, he says, he is going to put his vast record collection into alphabetical order: 'One of those tasks you look forward to with pleasure.' His CDs are already in alphabetical order: 'And I don't think that is anal. I think it is stupid not to be able to find music that you specifically want to listen to, and I am not apologising for that. In fact I am a great cataloguer.'
When he was 12, Sam West watched his father play Claudius to Derek Jacobi's Hamlet at the Old Vic. 'My father took a curtain call and that was the first time I remember thinking, "I would like to do that."' He refers to his decision to become an actor as 'entering the family business. There are three generations before me who have acted.' His mother is perhaps the most famous of them all, and certainly the most loved as the indomitable Sybil Fawlty, the Queen and that madwoman in the Tesco's ads.
She probably hates these descriptions but, as Sam says, 'My parents warned me it was a difficult profession. They were saying you are going to be unemployed, you are going to have to do shit work just to keep solvent, you are going to be associated with types or brands or characters that people will expect you to be - like my mother in the case of Sybil or Tesco's - and you will experience mild euphoria and pleasant triumphs and deep loneliness and despair.'
How close is Sam West to his famous parents? Does he get on with them? 'That is a hard question,' he says.
'I mean, yes, I do. Interestingly enough I have worked with my father and my mother, both in the same year, a film with my mother and a play with Dad, and at the end of the year we were still talking which I consider a major triumph.' Do they talk often? 'Sometimes the conversation turns too readily to professional things and I have to turn it round to more personal things. I remember speaking to my mother on the morning of 12 September and we didn't mention what had happened. And I remember being puzzled about that because I had a very long, late-night conversation with my best friend and were both quite frightened, as a lot of people were.'
One of his perennial worries, although he says he is going through a happy patch at the moment, is his broodiness. 'I used to keep rats,' he says, 'and I have a feeling I will be getting some more. I can't help it, they are child substitutes, and I am deeply broody.' But is there a girlfriend? 'There has been someone in my life at the moment but we are trying to work some things out. My brother had his first child when he was 28, and I am lost in admiration that he had the guts to make that leap because I have been close to it but never really capable. My only thought is that if I were to meet somebody who I wanted to share the foreseeable future with, I would want to be with them for a while before we had children.'
Is he as cautious as this about everything in his life?
I ask. 'Yes,' he says. 'I am a coward, basically, but one of the things about acting is that you are always putting yourself through yet another test. But I am not as brave as I should be: for instance, I have never appeared naked on stage. Not that one should take a part in order to appear naked on stage deliberately but if a part demanded it... ' What he goes on to explain is that someone he knows who has been naked on stage says that it is the people in the audience who are the most embarrassed. He has moved us deftly on from his love-life back to his career which will resume the minute
I have left: he has to prepare speeches from Henry V for the following day to accompany a recorded BBC Symphony Orchestra performance of Sir William Walton's music for Laurence Olivier's 1944 film.
In three days' time filming starts on an episode of Waking the Dead, a BBC drama series, in which Sam West is playing a serial killer. 'I really don't know how to play it. I mean Hamlet killed three in the play and he indirectly kills... no, he kills four, he knowingly kills four people, sorry, let's be specific, he knowingly kills three people, he condemns Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, he kills Polonius... '
This particular rumination goes on for another hundred or so words, and, at the end of it, Sam West still hasn't worked out how to play a serial killer. He's got until Monday morning though, by which time he'll be telling his BBC director all about it, and he will no doubt be quite charmingly in charge.
- 'Hamlet' opens at the Barbican, London EC2 (020-7638 8891), on 11 December
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