As the son of famous parents, it might seem the actor-director was destined for the stage, but at first he just wanted to study physics. Now, after acclaimed stints at the RSC and Sheffield's Crucible Theatre, and with a sellout hit moving to the West End, his star is firmly on the rise. By Rachel Cooke.
Sunday 25 November 2007
I'm only teasing. If West is being just a little bit precious tonight, well, perhaps he is entitled to be. By any standards, he's had an amazing year. First, his performance as Robert in Pinter's Betrayal at the Donmar Warehouse ('the best reviews of my life'), then his revival, 12 years after its debut at the National Theatre, of Dealer's Choice, which will now transfer to the West End (a summary of its uniformly great reviews might be: 'This is an even better play than we first thought').
The bonus is that this was a year he did not expect to have. West was supposed to be in Sheffield, at the Crucible Theatre, dreaming up his third season as its artistic director. But then the Crucible won Arts Council money for refurbishment, and it closed, leaving him with no stage. West wanted to take productions to other places in the city but it was not to be, and he felt he had no option but to say goodbye (a shame, I think: a nice bit of Brecht would do wonders for the Meadowhall shopping centre, which is the seventh circle of capitalist hell, only with air-conditioning).
Did he like Sheffield? 'I liked it extremely. It's a remarkable place. It's proper. It's not up its own arse.' Happily, a part of it is with him still: West has just moved in with his girlfriend, Laura Wade, the playwright, and she - he says proudly - is from Sheffield.
West has a 'long and happy history' with Dealer's Choice. '[In the 1990s] I had a little poker school, which included Nigel Lindsay, who went on to play Mugsy in the first production of Dealer's Choice, and Patrick played a few times, too.' He and Marber knew each other at Oxford, where they appeared in a production of The Winter's Tale. 'I played a not-very-good Florizel, he was a very funny Autolycus. The thing I principally remember is Patrick teaching me how to shave, which I hadn't done very much as a fresh-faced undergraduate. I slightly looked up to him.'
Since Dealer's Choice first opened in 1995 - then, it was directed by Marber - there have been dozens of productions around the world, but West's is the only one to have enjoyed the benefit of its author sitting in on rehearsals. 'Three times: enough to be useful but not enough to be frightening. He is someone I very much want to impress, which is not necessarily useful [as a director]. But a great play holds your hand if you go into its dark corners, and this one really does.'
Marber thinks that West's production has achieved something his own never did. 'Mine was a bit... poker-faced. It was my first play, and I was worried about the actors being seen to be too indulgent. Sam's is funny, but when the characters are at their most devastated and broken, you feel for them more. When the play opened, it was regarded as a lad's play; that was the sheen. We had Ray Winstone and Phil Daniels, and it was macho and sexy. This is sadder; Sam has allowed it to be more emotional.'
At the play's heart is the relationship between the proprietor of the restaurant where the action takes place, Stephen, and his compulsive gambler son, Carl. When Marber wrote this relationship, he was young, and saw the painful tango mostly from Carl's side. Now he is married and the father of three sons; suddenly he finds himself looking at it from inside Stephen's shoes. 'It amazes me that you can write about something without knowing about it [at the time]. I found it [watching this production] unbearable at times. I'd think: I hope I don't go through this with my boys. They're locked in an embrace that's killing both of them.' He says West is the most writer-friendly director he has ever worked with. 'We had a really good time together.'
On this cold, wet evening, West is sipping Coca-Cola delicately, little finger out, as if it was something stronger. He is also acting as if this were a viva (and this cuts both ways: 'That's a perfectly proper question,' he says, donnishly); he spends a lot of time staring into the distance. Oh, well. He tells me that he classes himself as someone who thinks too much, so perhaps he can't help himself on this score (it also infuriates him that people don't regard acting as intellectual: 'The idea that if you are very clever you shouldn't be an actor would be laughable in Russia,' he says, though I haven't suggested any such thing).
Still, for reasons I can't explain, I find him rather funny - and, in a cynical old world, he is both sincere and principled. Colleagues admired his decision to leave Sheffield (he could, after all, have allowed himself to be paid for doing nothing), and he does all sorts of actorly good works. At Oxford he was in the Socialist Workers Party, and he was a member of Socialist Alliance until it became Respect. 'Most actors are socialists, aren't they?' he says, when I ask about this (he refers to himself a 'Sarf London boy' but he went to private school and grew up in Wandsworth, so donkey jackets were not in the natural order of things - or maybe they were, in a Corin Redgrave kind of way; I don't know, I'm getting muddled). 'They work collectively, so they understand the value of being able to do so. Most good art is left wing. It's a moot point whether there is any good right-wing art.'
I'm even more confused now, because I always picture actors secretly trying to grab top billing or the best dressing room. Anyway, at 15, he asked his mother if he would, as people do, end up a Tory. 'I think you've gone too far for that, dear,' she said.
West is, as all the world knows, the son of Prunella Scales and Timothy West. As a child, though, and even as a teenager, it was not a given that he would follow them into acting. He liked, and still does like, nerdish pursuits such as trainspotting (these days it's birdwatching - recent visitors to his Islington fat-feeder have him in lyrical raptures - and he also had a needlepoint phase); his plan was to study physics at Oxford (in the end, he did English). He certainly wasn't in the mould of stage-school brat. 'What is successful when you're small is something like showing off, and I wasn't showy offy. I was, and am still, quite shy.'
But at 12, watching his father take a curtain call after playing Claudius in Hamlet, it occurred to him how enjoyable applause is. He was nine when his mother started playing Sybil Fawlty, and people at school would ask, as I do now, what it was like having famous parents. 'There isn't really an interesting answer,' he says. 'Except that you don't know what it's like not to.'
As a family, they are not competitive. 'My father doesn't tend to get jobs that I audition for, and my mother certainly doesn't. And my brother, brilliantly, has left behind the whole sorry business [Joe is a translator] and raised a beautiful family in France, which I admire almost more than anything.'
It must help, though, that he has never been unemployed for long. First, there were films (he is still best remembered as Leonard Bast, the clerk who is killed by a bookcase, in the film of Howards End), then there was the RSC. In between there have been lots of documentary voiceovers.
He is going to take a breather after Dealer's Choice is settled in the West End although, being an actor, he gets twitchy at the idea that I might inadvertently suggest that he is doing nothing (he is writing a book! It's about acting!); and then, not wanting me to suggest that he is getting overly twitchy either, he tells me a story he once heard. On the set of a film, Dustin Hoffman turned to Al Pacino and said: 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' To which Pacino replied: 'What? You mean, "I'll never work again?"'
We laugh for a bit, and I move to turn off my tape recorder. But he is not done yet. 'I have to tell you at some point in this lovely chat what the play is about,' he says. 'Because it's not about poker.' He pauses, meaningfully. 'What I've come to realise... is... it's what it is like to be born... into the curse of being... male and therefore competitive.'
Right. Does he think that men have it harder than women? 'I couldn't say. But I do know that one of the paradoxes of working in the profession... people will want to know why actors are called luvvies, why we're portrayed as shallow and insincere and insecure. If any other profession had as much insecurity as the acting profession, the level of insincerity would be much higher, and I find that actors - who call each other love and darling because they meet a lot of people - are some of the most straightforward, trustable people I've ever had the good fortune of knowing, and I'm proud to call many of them my friends. What we do is collaborative. It really is. It's not a competition. We've got a fucking great cast who respect each other, and are incredibly supportive of each other, so that when they get on stage they can beat the shit out of each other.'
I must admit that while West made this (entirely unprovoked, I promise) speech, the corners of my mouth twitched a little. But when I got home, and typed it out, it seemed rather lovely. The cast of Dealer's Choice has chosen to take a company wage and to be billed alphabetically when it goes up west. He's a part of the reason why, I guess.
· Dealer's Choice is at the Trafalgar Studios, London SW1, 6 Dec-29 March
West Life: The basics
Early days Born 19 June 1966, London, son of actors Prunella Scales and Timothy West. Read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
Career highlights
1991 BAFTA-nominated for his big break playing Lenny in the film Howards End
2001 Wins the London Critics' Circle Theatre award for best Shakespearean actor for his RSC Hamlet.
2005-6 Artistic director of Sheffield's Crucible Theatre.
Politics Vocal critic of Tony Blair. Former member of the Socialist Worker's Party.
They say 'He's a passionate human being who cares deeply about the world. That gives him a vehemence and energy that comes through his work.' Steven Pimlott
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2007/nov/25/rsc.theatre
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