My week: Samuel West
The actor reflects on a quintessentially English week – the Proms, Test Match Special and the Royal Court
I may have had the most English weekend of anyone in England: the Proms on Friday, Test Match Special for seven hours of Saturday, then to London's Royal Court for the last performance of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem. I missed the great English Broad-side on Friday – went into a Soho studio to do a voiceover when the Australians were 82 for 1 and when I came out they were 112 for 7. But Saturday's TMS marathon set me up nicely for Butterworth's magnum opus that night. (Playing in rep, as we are at the moment in Chichester, has its advantages. You can fit your illnesses into gaps in the schedule and you can go and see someone else shouting in the evenings.)
I'm playing Jeffrey Skilling, the company's CEO. It's a stonking part – almost never offstage, his fall likened to a corporate Macbeth. And it's useful for someone left wing like me to play an unrepentant free-marketeer. It reminds me that my job is not to comment, just play the man. Let the audience decide, as they must when you play Nazis, paedophiles, serial killers.
It's good to be exploring the staid world of business through a show that includes dance, song, dinosaurs and a light-sabre fight, but there's a sweeter irony: nowadays, we have to go to the playhouse, the palace of illusion, to discover the truth. The last 15 years have felt like they were built on sand and now we know why: derivatives aren't real money. Enron goes some way to explaining that uneasy feeling, but importantly, it does it in a fun and clear way.
The most common audience reaction is an incredulous cry of: "Have we learnt nothing?" All rehearsals produce resonances: my greatest one was the appointment of Stephen Hester, Fred Goodwin's successor as CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland. His new £9.6m pay deal includes £6.4m payable if RBS hit a particular stock price. When Skilling ran Enron, the stock price was king. Nobody cared about balances, or delivering the goods they'd promised, or sustainability, or the company's health. As long as that ticker kept climbing.
Why the government-run UK Financial Investments thinks this is the right model for RBS, 70% of which is owned by us, is beyond me. It will encourage risky business and discourage lending. You'll forgive a company working on a play like ours for being suspicious.
Enron continues rammed; recent audiences have been a little stodgy, except to our surprise, at Wednesday matinees. These are traditionally the quietest shows of the week, but not in Chichester. Though most of the audience are pushing 90, they're concentrating, quick and full of laughter. I wonder if this is because they have a different attitude to debt. Most of Enron's cast are young, and half of them are still paying off student loans. Elderly Chichester audiences have never accepted that level of debt as a way of life. Perhaps a play about a company inflating its worth plays more dangerously to a generation used to living within its means.
We're moving to the Royal Court in two weeks. Never worked there and slightly apprehensive to be following the genius Jerusalem in, but if I were Dominic Cooke (the Court's artistic director), I'd be thrilled to have two such different plays back to back. They meet at almost no point.
And if to London, so to re-rehearsal. The Minerva is a thrust stage and the Court a narrower proscenium arch. Much must be restaged. I wonder how this will affect the play. In the Minerva, audience and actors are in the same room. When we talk to the audience, they're only a few feet away and we can see them; it's less a lecture, more a friendly chat. From behind a proscenium arch, framed in a different box and talking blindly into the stalls, status and hubris are greater.
Both Jerusalem and Enron may transfer to the West End. Fingers crossed; we're sold out at the Royal Court and I want to play to as many cabinet ministers as possible.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2009/aug/30/my-week-sam-west
I loved Jerusalem – a great Wiltshire tapestry, huge and filling and ordinary. It's rare and refreshing to see a state-of-the-nation play that's not about the nation being rubbish. Mark Rylance's Rooster Byron is a great creation, a rebel without applause. Rooster has roots where the rest of us have feet. Some singing blood in him takes his tales to a place where they are neither tiresomely false, nor narrowly true, but wonderfully possible. When he tells us of meeting a giant, a cigarette lighter stands for him and he becomes the giant towering over it; we hug ourselves with delight, but we also begin to believe in giants.
And then to the British Birdwatching Fair in Rutland, a tribal gathering of a different sort. I could have sworn Rutland had been abolished; I've certainly managed to miss it so far. Birdfair is very matey, very sweaty and full of holiday porn – emissaries from Finland, Jamaica, Paraguay, all trying to get you to come and see their birds. Left with a bag full of brochures and a head full of dreams and on the way home I trudged over a fen on the Ouse to see a pair of great white egrets, huge and hazy between tethered horses.From echt English to all-American. Back to the Minerva Theatre in Chichester for the last week of Enron, Lucy Prebble's astounding exploration of the energy company's collapse. A rare job where everything comes together. The director is Rupert Goold, one of the most inventive people I've worked with and one of the most easily bored.
The company is drawn from every discipline – ballet, mime, musicals, the RSC – and like and respect each other. And the play has found its moment. Rupert's company, Headlong, commissioned a writer who did what every clever writer should do: sniffed the air and scented the need for a play like this. By the time it was ready, the world had collapsed and people wanted to know why. Plays sometimes get their finger on the pulse and Lucy's has done that. With the demise of single drama on TV, a writer-led response to current events is much harder to find.I'm playing Jeffrey Skilling, the company's CEO. It's a stonking part – almost never offstage, his fall likened to a corporate Macbeth. And it's useful for someone left wing like me to play an unrepentant free-marketeer. It reminds me that my job is not to comment, just play the man. Let the audience decide, as they must when you play Nazis, paedophiles, serial killers.
It's good to be exploring the staid world of business through a show that includes dance, song, dinosaurs and a light-sabre fight, but there's a sweeter irony: nowadays, we have to go to the playhouse, the palace of illusion, to discover the truth. The last 15 years have felt like they were built on sand and now we know why: derivatives aren't real money. Enron goes some way to explaining that uneasy feeling, but importantly, it does it in a fun and clear way.
The most common audience reaction is an incredulous cry of: "Have we learnt nothing?" All rehearsals produce resonances: my greatest one was the appointment of Stephen Hester, Fred Goodwin's successor as CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland. His new £9.6m pay deal includes £6.4m payable if RBS hit a particular stock price. When Skilling ran Enron, the stock price was king. Nobody cared about balances, or delivering the goods they'd promised, or sustainability, or the company's health. As long as that ticker kept climbing.
Why the government-run UK Financial Investments thinks this is the right model for RBS, 70% of which is owned by us, is beyond me. It will encourage risky business and discourage lending. You'll forgive a company working on a play like ours for being suspicious.
Enron continues rammed; recent audiences have been a little stodgy, except to our surprise, at Wednesday matinees. These are traditionally the quietest shows of the week, but not in Chichester. Though most of the audience are pushing 90, they're concentrating, quick and full of laughter. I wonder if this is because they have a different attitude to debt. Most of Enron's cast are young, and half of them are still paying off student loans. Elderly Chichester audiences have never accepted that level of debt as a way of life. Perhaps a play about a company inflating its worth plays more dangerously to a generation used to living within its means.
We're moving to the Royal Court in two weeks. Never worked there and slightly apprehensive to be following the genius Jerusalem in, but if I were Dominic Cooke (the Court's artistic director), I'd be thrilled to have two such different plays back to back. They meet at almost no point.
And if to London, so to re-rehearsal. The Minerva is a thrust stage and the Court a narrower proscenium arch. Much must be restaged. I wonder how this will affect the play. In the Minerva, audience and actors are in the same room. When we talk to the audience, they're only a few feet away and we can see them; it's less a lecture, more a friendly chat. From behind a proscenium arch, framed in a different box and talking blindly into the stalls, status and hubris are greater.
Both Jerusalem and Enron may transfer to the West End. Fingers crossed; we're sold out at the Royal Court and I want to play to as many cabinet ministers as possible.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2009/aug/30/my-week-sam-west
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