The Big Interview: Sam West

The Big Interview: Sam West  

 

 

By Nick Ahad
Published on Monday 21 May 2012 00:00

Sam West is a good looking chap who has appeared on screen with Julia Roberts and managed not to look like Quasimodo. He’s a respected director as well as a much admired actor and fiercely intelligent. He has charisma by the bucketload and exudes star quality.

But sitting opposite him in the wardrobe in the bowels of the Newcastle theatre I discover something else. Sam West is a total geek.
He’s excited about all the books on post-Great War Britain he’s been reading for research, he’s still got the sheet music from the first single he bought in 1978 – Hit me With Your Rhythm Stick – he’s really excited by the history of coal, he’s thrilled to bits to share the news that he kept a section of the famous carpet from the pre-refurbishment Sheffield Crucible. He is also, I happen to know of old, an avid birdwatcher.
Total geek.

And yet he remains pretty cool. Indeed, one of the things he has collected – the man is clearly a hoarder – is a call sheet from the last movie he appeared in and the story has more than an air of cool about it. “I was filming a movie for Focus International in April called Hyde Park on Hudson will Bill Murray, Olivia Coleman, Laura Linney – some quite brilliant people. Elizabeth Wilson was in it – she played Dustin Hoffman’s mother in The Graduate, was in Hitchcock’s The Birds and Notorious in 1946 with Cary Grant. It’s so remarkable to meet and work with someone like that and to be a few handshakes away from such greatness.
“In the movie Bill plays Roosevelt and I play King George VI. One day we were filming a nine-minute two-hander with just me and Bill – I kept the call sheet from that day – it just had my name and Bill’s name on it. It might not be a nine-minute two-hander in the final cut, but that was a great day.”
It’s stories like that, that make West undeniably impressive, but he immediately pulls the rug from under the feet of his own claims to cool.
“One day shortly before filming I found myself going to an out-of-the-way underground club in London to see the modern version of Booker T and the MGs – the Stax houseband (he gets very excited about this).
“They were amazing, playing Green Onions and Knock on Wood. Then someone who looked familiar came on to sing a number with them, holding a tambourine – and it was Bill. The following day I was in the make-up trailer and Bill came in. I said ‘I saw you on stage last night’ and briefly I became cool because it was this little out of the way club with 200 very hip people and I just happened to be one of them.”
The way he tells it, Sam West is a man in the right place at the right time and it might be tempting to consider that his career – like that of any actor – as a case of lucky timing. The truth is he has worked hard at his success. Perhaps being the son of Timothy West and Prunella Scales means that you have to work extra hard to prove yourself.
He certainly worked like a Trojan when he was running Sheffield Theatres for a couple of years from 2005 and he appears to have barely aged a day since he was appointed artistic director of the theatres (the Crucible, Lyceum and Studio) replacing the highly regarded Michael Grandage. They were big shoes to fill and West did an impressive job – but it ended on a less than positive note.
The Crucible was closing for refurbishment and West wanted to remain in post – and keep the theatre producing work – while it took place. The board didn’t agree and he left.
“The best thing I can say about Sheffield is that I enjoyed my first two seasons very much and would liked to have had a third – but there was a disagreement. Although it was amicable, it was also a disagreement,” he says, resolutely.
“I wanted to keep producing work but for all sorts of perfectly justifiable reasons they thought we couldn’t afford or handle it. I felt we should keep making work while the theatre was shut at all costs.”
Sour grapes? If there are any, West isn’t saying.
“I am delighted that since the theatre re-opened they seem to have re-captured their audience but that’s because Dan (Evans, the current artistic director) is doing very good work with some very good people.
“When Dan was appointed, in one of his first speeches – I think one of the first things he said – was that he was pleased that I had been there and taken the theatre into the refurbishment.
“My concern was that Michael had done such a great job in handing things over to his successor – me – that I wanted to feel I had done the same thing. When I left I didn’t even know who the new artistic director would be, so I never had that opportunity.
“When Dan thanked me, it felt like I had – that awful word – a sense of closure. It was a nod to me and what I had done and that was all that I felt I needed, nothing more than that.”
He has returned to Sheffield a number of times since and “had some very good evenings” but has not felt the need to keep harking back to that period. In fact, since leaving, he has had some of the best professional experiences of his career. He played the lead in Enron in the West End, one of the theatre world’s major hits of the last decade, has appeared in A Number in South Africa opposite his father Timothy (“we played together on his 76th and 77th birthday”) and in ITV series Eternal Law, had the biggest TV role of his career.
Filmed in York and written by the team behind Life on Mars, West played an angel sent to earth as a lawyer to help mankind. “It was absolutely the most enjoyable television job I’ve ever done. I’ve played leads in shows like Narnia and Cambridge Spies, but this was a lead in a six-part series filmed for three months. It was in York, in late spring and early summer, I had a little house next to Orla Brady and we used to have soup and learn our lines together. I worked 61 days out of 64 on the shoot, I’d walk to work, it was lovely.”
The show didn’t find an audience – or it did, three million, but it wasn’t the five million needed to return to the screen. The lack of another series is a shame, West clearly feels, but he has plenty to keep him busy.
What is doing that and making him buzz almost out of his seat in Newcastle, is Close the Coalhouse Door. Alan Plater’s early play is being revived for the first time since the playwright’s death in 2010.
“I’ve been mostly buying and reading books for the play – which is a list that unfortunately never ends. One arrived today called Communism in the Bible which is a really exciting and important book.”
I laugh at this, not the idea that the book is important, but that Communism in the Bible is exciting. West does not laugh along. He’s perfectly serious. “I can’t wait to get stuck into it. I’ve been talking to Paul Younger from Newcastle University, a civil engineer and an expert on water. But he’s also a Christian Socialist and knows a lot about the Prims, the Primitive Methodists, who took the Bible as a sort of radical text – very popular with pitmen in the 1860s. A lot of South American liberation theologists do today in fact, basically...”
And he’s off. It’s difficult to explain just how excited West is about the idea of pitmen’s religious beliefs in the 1860s. He’s almost as excited as he is about discovering that a member of the acting union Equity, is an expert in British political history from 1910 to 1926.
“He spent two years studying that 16- year period, can you imagine,” asks West. I really can’t. “It was the most fascinating period of British history...” He then gets excited about coal fields.
He also gets very excited about politics. Over the past few years he has become one of the arts world’s leading public figures in speaking out against the cuts to public funding of the sector. The fierce intellect, endless curiosity, the politics, make him the perfect person to lead a production of Close the Coalhouse Door.
Based on the stories of Sid Chaplin, Alan Plater’s play was first performed in Newcastle in 1968. It’s set around a wedding anniversary party and charts the major strikes, victories and disappointments in British mining history from the formation of the first unions in 1831. The story is structured around Alex Glasgow’s joyful and heart-tugging music inspired by north-eastern folk songs performed by highly-skilled actor-musicians and in this latest version has seen a script revision by Billy Elliott writer Lee Hall.
“It sounds facile, but it’s true – it’s a great honour to have been given responsibility of the first revival since he died of Alan’s best known play.
“We will have people who remember the first production, people who have never heard of it, those who won’t have the first inkling of what a miner’s life was like and it has to speak to all of them.
“I think when we bring the show to Yorkshire, it will really speak to people who feel connected to the history of manufacturing through their towns and the industry that was once there. In fact, did you know...”
He’s off again. The coolest geek you might ever meet.
Close the Coalhouse Door, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield, May 23 – 26. York Theatre Royal June 26 - 30.

 

Close the Coalhouse Door delivers miners' message

11 April 2012

By Ian Youngs Arts reporter, BBC News

Director Samuel West and writer Lee Hall hope a revival of Alan Plater's 1968 play Close the Coalhouse Door can teach a new generation about fighting for their rights.



Mining is a theme in Lee Hall's work from Billy Elliot
to The Pitmen Painters. Photo: NCJ Media



When I put my first question to Samuel West, a simple query about his motivation for staging Close the Coalhouse Door, he begins his answer with the words: "I make no secret of the fact that I disagree with the direction of our current government..."

The play is 44 years old and centres on the lives of miners in Newcastle, so it may seem odd that the conversation immediately turns to modern politics.

But Samuel West - the actor-director who starred in Howard's End and the play Enron - and Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall are both political animals.
So it soon transpires that there is more to this revival, which opens at Northern Stage in Newcastle on Friday, than just the resurrection of a neglected theatrical treasure.
When the play first came to the city in 1968, it was a massive hit.
Stories of pitmen going to the theatre instead of the football on a Saturday afternoon, and of coachloads of miners rolling up at the theatre in their Sunday best, have passed into local legend.
The plot revolves around a Newcastle family looking back on 140 years of miners' struggles against pit-owners and politicians.


Actor-turned-director Samuel West: "It was a story that needed to be told." Photo: Topher McGrillis



But Plater's irreverent saga of bickering brothers and plucky underdogs, coupled with songs by Alex Glasgow, is more than just a dry lesson in the history of industrial relations.

Starting in the 1830s, it recounts how pioneering unions formed, and went on strike, in protest at long hours worked by young boys and "bonds" that tied miners to punishing rules and conditions.

By joining together for strength in the face of hardship, the miners gradually won more rights as the decades wore on.

 


"The play becomes very relevant because it is a celebration of having collectively achieved something as a nation that I think we're in danger of throwing away," says Hall.

"It's a reminder that the life we rely on now was not always the case. People had to fight for it."
The play has lessons for people hit by of the current financial crisis and austerity cuts, he believes.


Close the Coalhouse Door opens at Northern Stage
 in Newcastle before going on a UK tour



"There's a feeling now that it's so hopeless and there's nothing we can do and we just have to put up with it because it's the inexorable forces of history and economics.

"[In the play] you see that every 30 or 40 years, just in one industry alone, exactly the same things happen again and again.
"But what they didn't do was just to sit and take it. What they did do was to fight back."
The play is "very provocative" in today's climate, he says.
West, the son of British acting legends Timothy West and Prunella Scales and a former member of the Socialist Workers' Party, is similarly strident.
He accuses the coalition government of using the financial crisis as "an excuse" to reduce living standards and turn individuals against each other.
"That's not how progress is made and it isn't how the miners progressed in this country," he says. "I thought it was a story that needed to be told, really."
West winces at the thought he is "preaching" and insists it is a good piece of theatre. "It's not at all narrow agitprop."



Many people will disagree with the pair's politics and with Plater's interpretation of history, which firmly pits the gutsy workers against the evil elite.

And while it was a hit in Newcastle first time around, the play was a flop when it moved to the West End.



The play was televised by the BBC in 1968



The north-east folk story, dominated by the mining industry's heroes and villains, did not strike a chord in London. The thick Geordie brogue probably did not help.

This time the show, a co-production between Northern Stage and Live Theatre in Newcastle, is going on tour after its run in the city.

Hall and West are confident that it will fare better in places like Richmond-upon-Thames, Guildford and Oxford than it did in the West End.

For the new version, Hall, a friend and protege of Plater, has added a short scene at the beginning to take people back to 1968, and one at the end that gives the 1968 family's rose-tinted vision of how the next 44 years would pan out.



Alan Plater was made a CBE for services to drama in 2005, five years before his death



Unfortunately, Newcastle United have not ended up as winners of the European Cup for 15 years in a row.

But Hall and West want the miners of the past to deliver a serious message to the audiences of the present. So what difference can a show like this really make?

"I'm not sure that plays can make any difference, but they can make people think," Hall says.

"If it reminds one single person that what is purported to be inevitable is not inevitable, then it will have been worth reviving.

"I think its big message is that the people of the 99%, the ordinary people, have some power and can alter things. I think it's a timely reminder to people that that is the case."

Interview: Actor Sam West on Close the Coalhouse Door

Interview: Actor Sam West on Close the Coalhouse Door

15/02/2012

As a new production of Close the Coalhouse Door starts to take shape, actor-director Sam West talks to BARBARA HODGSON about his role in reviving a Northern classic

IN 1962 when Close the Coalhouse Door made its debut in Newcastle local people turned out in their droves, ensuring an instant sell-out.
What for many was a rare night at the theatre stirred regional pride.
At the heart of Alan Plater’s musical play – based on stories by Sid Chaplin – were working class heroes, miners and their families.
Knitted into the story of a couple’s golden wedding party were threads of mining history, flashbacks to hopes and disappointments with plenty of laughter along the way, while pulsating through it all were the vibrant songs of socialist songwriter Alex Glasgow.
It was political, pickaxe-rattling stuff long before the decimation of the coal mining industry in the 1980s really got the blood flowing.
After the warmth of its welcome in Newcastle, its transfer to London’s West End met with a reception that could be described at best as tepid.

But that was then, and we’ve since seen modern Northern classics such as Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters seduce Southern audiences with their spirit and charm.
Now even Sting is getting in on the act with his plans for a Wallsend shipyards-inspired musical called The Last Ship.
It will be interesting to see how a revival of Close the Coalhouse Door – opening in April on the site of its debut at the former Newcastle Playhouse, now Northern Stage – will be received this time when it goes on tour.
“It didn’t do particularly well then in London. It should have done!” says Sam West who’s directing the new production, a collaboration between Northern Stage and Live Theatre, which is based on Newcastle Quayside.
The London-based actor director – nominated for a BAFTA for his role in 1992 Merchant Ivory film Howards End and star of the just ended ITV1 series Eternal Law – is fully aware of his responsibility in taking over a Northern classic, whose creators are now all dead. “That’s one of the slight pressures of doing it here,” admits the 45-year-old when I catch up with him at Northern Stage, “but it’s a nice pressure.”
West remains best known for his stage, TV and film roles, but recent years – including his spell as artistic director of Sheffield Theatres – have seen him make his name as a director. He’s also recently directed his first radio play.
Hearing his enthusiasm for his new project, which will see Lee Hall write new material to bring the story up to date, assures us it’s in a safe pair of hands.
West has done his homework. He makes passing reference to visiting Woodhorn, the former colliery-turned museum in Northumberland, and when I mention the work of local photographer Keith Pattison, who covered the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Easington, he already knows it.
The background of the play is something West can connect with, regardless of what his own growing up as the son of famous acting parents Timothy West and Prunella Scales, might have been like.
At university he joined the Socialist Workers Party and was briefly a member of the Socialist Alliance. He mentions he’s a member of the council of Equity, the actors’ union, and while he’s not talking about himself when he says “sometimes you need a terrier to fight your corner”, you get the impression he could.
As an 18-year-old, West was in Western Australia, where his mother was directing his father in Uncle Vanya, at the time Alex Glasgow emigrated there with his family and he muses he could have passed the late singer-songwriter in the street.
As it happens, his connection with the play came about by chance.
He recalls that after Plater’s death he’d read an obituary praising the brilliance of Close the Coalhouse Door. Then he met Michael Chaplin – writer son of Sid – at a wedding and brought up the subject.
“I said, ‘I wonder who will revive the play’ and he said ‘why don’t you revive it’? I thought ‘that’s not going to happen’.” However, there followed talks involving Max Roberts, artistic director of Live Theatre and also Plater’s son-in-law, and Erica Whyman, chief executive of Northern Stage, and the seeds of a collaboration took root.
“And that was that,” says West. “They asked me, I was free and it’s very exciting.”
Previous revivals of the play don’t seem to have had the buzz of this one, which has Hall incorporating the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike.
He and West, who changed their mind about the initial idea of including a new song, have been deep in discussion about it in the capital (Hall’s home is just around the corner from West’s) ahead of Newcastle rehearsals which are soon to start.
On the day I meet West, cast details have been finalised but not yet released.


Having just spoken of a conversation with a North East taxi driver who’d seen Billy Elliot in London and remarked that the actors didn’t have proper Easington accents, West says: “You have to get it right and that’s something we’re going to try to do.
“The actors will be native to the North East or very convincing Geordies.”
West intends to tread carefully with the play, striking just the right note to bridge the time gap and connect with those too young to have a memory of the 1980s strike let alone the play’s 1960s context.
“One of the things I’m trying to do with Lee is to get back to that ‘68 version and to open it out in ways that are more about being true to the 68 version.”
In terms of framework, Plater’s play will sit in the middle rather than be part of an updated whole.
“We’re trying to preserve the piece,” says West. “I don’t want to say too much about it. We want it be a nice surprise.
“It will be good, it will be subtle and hard hitting.”

He adds: “We’re certainly intending to use all Alex’s original music. The play has beautiful songs and beautiful writing.
“One of the very interesting things about talking to Michael about his dad was how Sid’s style had come out in this play.”
Those rich stories, convincingly brought to life on stage, become important memories, he suggests, “when you destroy an industry like Margaret Thatcher did”.
“Culture nowadays is becoming about dressing up in the evenings for posh people and we have to remind ourselves that stories belong to the people.”
He’s looking forward to working in Newcastle, where in the past he has starred in RSC productions of Richard ll and (his award-winning) Hamlet.
West is glad, he says, that he doesn’t have to make his living as a director: “I find it much more difficult that acting.
“When actors say no to me, and they might for all sorts of reasons, I tend to take it terribly personally, but I can say no for the same reasons!” Ideally, he’d like to keep his hand in with directing once or twice a year, alongside his acting and also radio work.
He’s incredibly busy.
“I did Enron, which ran for almost a year, and last year I did a TV series and a film,” he says.
He recently starred alongside his father in Caryl Churchill’s two-hander A Number, a play about cloning which revisits the nature versus nurture debate.
It took them to Cape Town where his father “did a great performance– at 77!” He laughs: “My dad is just like a 25-year-old, if he’s unemployed for six weeks he gets really antsy.”
West’s mother, the former Fawlty Towers star, works “not so much”, he says, although they have just worked together on readings picked by Nicholas Parsons for the radio show, With Great Pleasure.
He’s just waiting to hear whether there’s to be another series of Eternal Law, where he loved being pitched in, student accommodation-like, and being able to walk to work in the beautiful city of York.
“I very much hope there will be. It was one of the happiest jobs I’ve ever done, and others enjoyed it.
“Whether they enjoyed it enough is another question.”
He hopes to be directing again towards the end of the year, and he also has a film coming out: Hyde Park On Hudson, about the royal visit George Vl made to President Roosevelt in 1939, in which he plays the king opposite Bill Murray’s President.
Following the meeting of the men who each struggled with a physical challenge – the king his stammer and Roosevelt with polio – George Vl returned with a renewed confidence, says West, in his role.
“I’m a republican but I think you have to recognise a job well done,” he adds.
Close the Coalhouse Door is at Northern Stage from April 13 until May 5 before heading off on a national tour which also takes in Gala Theatre in Durham from June 12-16. Visit www.northernstage.co.uk or call 0191 230 5151.


Read More http://www.journallive.co.uk/culture-newcastle/culture-latest-news//2012/02/15/interview-actor-sam-west-on-close-the-coalhouse-door-61634-30335099/2/#ixzz1nQOdAAD8

Samuel West Is A Law-Abiding Angel

By Marion McMullen on Jan 29, 12 09:04 PM

BRITISH actor Samuel West is flying high playing angelic solicitor Zak Gist in quirky legal drama Eternal Law
In a career that's spanned more than two decades, Samuel has played many different roles, from Shakespearean monarchs and princes, through to Dr Frankenstein and an infamous spy to tragic dreamers.
However, there was one gaping hole on his CV which, thankfully, has now been filled.
He hadn't made a habit of tackling heavenly bodies until Eternal Law came along. And his character here, Zak Gist, isn't just any angel - he's also a lawyer.
"He's a tough, uncompromising angel who's not afraid to break the rules - which makes him sound like every bad cop that's had a series based around him!" Samuel says with a grin.
"He is grumpy though. He's quite cynical. Angels do tours of duty like soldiers do, and they get pulled back when it all gets too much, which is what's started happening to Zak."

The basic premise comes from Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah of Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes fame.
Joining Zak on Earth is his rookie angel sidekick Tom (Ukweli Roache). They rent rooms in the home of Mrs Sheringham (Orla Brady), a former angel who, unlike Zak, did give up immortality for the human she loved - only for him to die, leaving her bereft.
But there's another 'character' at the centre of the drama - the city of York.
The entire series was filmed on location there, with a former hospital overlooking the historic Minster providing studio and office space for the cast and crew.
It's a fittingly ethereal setting for this heavenly drama, and being there has given West a chance to reconnect with a county he feels is in his blood.
His actor parents - Timothy West and Prunella Scales - both grew up in Yorkshire, while Samuel himself, the elder of their two sons, lived there for two years until 2007.
"I used to run Sheffield Theatres and lived in Yorkshire, although North Yorkshire people believe that South Yorkshire folk are from a different country - and in some ways that's justified! I loved Sheffield and miss it very much."
Having grown up surrounded by show business, it seemed inevitable that he would become an actor.
After studying English Literature at Oxford University, he gained rave reviews for his professional acting debut as Michael in Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles.
Many acclaimed theatre roles have followed since, including the leads in Richard II and Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
He gained a Bafta nomination for Howards End, in which he played Helena Bonham Carter's doomed lover, and other film and TV projects include Van Helsing, Notting Hill, and Cambridge Spies.
However, unlike many thespians of his age (he's 45), Samuel hasn't had what could be described as a signature role - until now.
Although he admits he doesn't have the analytical brain required to be a good lawyer like Zak, there are similarities between being an actor and a legal eagle.
"There's a certain amount of empathetic perception involved in defending somebody other people think might be guilty," he remarks.
"And there's a brilliant principle involved, which is being eroded at the moment thanks to the cuts in legal aid - that everybody deserves an equal chance before the law, whether they can afford it or not.
"I hope that this series will do something to remind people of that. It's a great system, and one that deserves to continue."
Coventry Telegraph

Sam West

Sam West

5 January 2012

I interviewed the actor Sam West today (that is him on the far right of the photo looking grumpy!) It's his character in a new television drama series which starts tonight called Eternal Law. It is from the creators of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, but instead of time-travelling policemen, sixties and seventies nostalgia and DCI Gene Hunt, this one is about angels sent down from heaven to work as lawyers.
Sam kind of threw me at the start of the interview saying he wanted to be called Samuel first and then Sam afterwards. But instead of that being an antsy actor thing, Samuel/Sam turned out to be one of the nicest guests I have ever had. Chatty, thoughtful, eager to come to Belfast so he could visit the City's Punk Shrines. I did suggest Terri Hooley could be his guide, but then wondered if he would survive such a tour!
Son of Timothy West and Prunella Scales, Sam comes from acting royalty. His parents are part of my childhood telly watching memories. Sybill in "Fawlty Towers" and that voice "Bas....illll". But it's his dad, Timothy West, who wins hands down. It's an episode of "Tales of the Unexpected". I remember he played a bee-keeper, who eats the jelly and ends up turning into a bee. The image of him at the end, buzzing and sprouting bee like hairs on the backs of his hands, freaked me out.
I tell Sam this. He says he's been told this before. It's called The Royal Jelly episode. A lot of people tell him it gave them nightmares. He says he's going to tell his dad and that he will be chuffed. Afterwards, I google the episode. It went out in March 1980. Still vivid all these years later. Put me off honey for life. *shudder*
"Eternal Law" is on ITV1 tonight at 9pm

BBC Artsextra

Laura Linney, Samuel West In Talks To Star Opposite Bill Murray's F.D.R. In 'Hyde Park On Hudson'

Laura Linney, Samuel West In Talks To Star Opposite Bill Murray's F.D.R. In 'Hyde Park On Hudson'

Olivia Colman To Play Queen Elizabeth

May 6, 2011

Depressingly for those of us in the U.K. who would like to throw off the yoke of our apparently-appointed-by-god inbred oppressors, royalty is big business at the moment. Between the enormous, Oscar-winning success of "The King's Speech," and the royal wedding last week, the Windsors are back, and there's more than one film project in the works at present. For instance, Dakota Fanning is attached to play the young Princess Margaret in the romantic-comedy "Girl's Night Out," although that won't move forward until after director Michael Hoffman is done with "Gambit."

And George VI and his wife Elizabeth (played by Colin Firth and Helena Bonham-Carter in "The King's Speech") are heading back to the big-screen for the Roger Michell-helmed drama "Hyde Park On Hudson," which will examine the, ahem, "close friendship" between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his distant cousin Margaret Suckley, against the background of King George's visit to New York, the first time a British monarch had ever set foot on American soil. Yesterday, Variety confirmed that, as rumored, Bill Murray would be playing the president, something that, typical for the actor, has taken over a year of courtship, and now we've got some news of who will likely be joining him.
Baz Bamigboye reports that Laura Linney is in the advanced stages of talks to play Margaret in the project, while British actors Samuel West and Olivia Colman are stepping into their compatriots' awards-laden shoes as King George and Queen Elizabeth. Linney is, of course, bloody marvellous, and seems to be an excellent fit for the part.
Their British counterparts are less familiar to U.S. audiences, but they're equally well-matched. West is a theater veteran, son of legendary British actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales, who's probably most familiar abroad for small roles in "Van Helsing" and "Iris." He's worked with Michell a number of times before, both on screen ("Notting Hill," "Persuasion"), and on stage, in an excellent 2007 production of Harold Pinter's "Betrayal," and he's been more prominent in recent years, thanks to the lead role in the hit play "Enron," as well as becoming a leading opponent to the current British government's program of cuts.
Meanwhile, Colman's also on the rise. A veteran of TV comedies like "Peep Show" and "Green Wing," she had a scene-stealing role in "Hot Fuzz," but she's taken a big step towards big-screen dramatic work this year, with a widely acclaimed lead performance in Paddy Considine's Sundance hit "Tyrannosaur" opposite Peter Mullan, and she's just wrapped up a role as Margaret Thatcher's daughter Carol in the Meryl Streep-toplining biopic "The Iron Lady." We're sure her role and West's will be far less prominent than in "The King's Speech," but they're certainly two performers who won't be afraid of being overshadowed by that film.
All in all, things are looking very promising here -- director Michell sometimes gets lumped in with the likes of John Madden and Mike Newell, but for the most part his films are terrific, particularly his low-key British pictures like "The Mother" and "Venus." He's assembled quite a cast for the project, and, although it's a while off, we'd put money on the 2013 Best Actor race being a presidential face-off between the long-overdue Murray and Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg's "Lincoln." Film4 and Focus are backing the project, which will be shopped at Cannes next week, with filming planned to get underway in July.

Indiewire - Laura Linney, Samuel West In Talks To Star Opposite Bill Murray's F.D.R. In 'Hyde Park On Hudson'

Music stirs chambers of the heart

Music stirs chambers of the heart

November 16, 2010

"There was room for something much more in-depth and psychological" . . .
Samuel West plays the (supposed) lover to a murdered woman. Photo: Dean Sewell

British actor Samuel West is combining his two great loves, writes Catherine Keenan.

When Samuel West was 17, he fancied a cellist at his school who went off to the International Musicians Seminar in Prussia Cove, Cornwall. She wrote urging him to come also. ''As a cellist?'' he asked hopefully (he dabbled then, as now). She said, ''No, but you could work in the kitchens. You could do the washing up.'' He did.
He was so taken with the place, he's been back about 50 times in the past 25-odd years, washing dishes for five or six weeks a year. ''I stage manage the concerts as well, but it's mostly washing up,'' he says, in his richly resonant voice, emanating from the face of a boy scout.

It's an odd thing for one of Britain's more respected actors to do. He's played Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed opera for English National Opera, appeared in films including Howards End and Notting Hill, and he recently earned rave reviews - and a Laurence Olivier Award nomination - for his role in Enron in the West End. But the experience confirmed West's love of chamber music. Which, it turns out, has been great news for the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
West and Michael Stevens, the ACO's artistic administrator, became friends when they toured the Middle East together with the Choir of London. Stevens wanted to do something with West in Australia - while West may not have made it as a cellist, that velvety voice makes him a sought-after narrator. He's worked with many of Britain's orchestras on works that include Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals and William Walton's Facade.
He and Stevens came up with the idea of linking the three great works of art called the Kreutzer Sonata: Beethoven's original work; Tolstoy's novella about a man who murders his wife for her supposed infidelity, in which Beethoven's sonata (perhaps) inflames passions; and Janacek's Quartet No. 1, which West and Stevens agreed was not, as is sometimes thought, a programmatic description of the Tolstoy.
Tolstoy's story is told from the point of view of the jealous man, the murderer, whereas Janacek's sympathies lay more with the silent, murdered woman. ''There was room for something much more in-depth and psychological,'' says West. ''And then it was over to Laura to see how she could make it work.''
Laura is Laura Wade, 33, West's partner and a rising playwright. (Her first two plays earned her a Critics' Circle Theatre Award for most promising playwright). Like Janacek, she found her imagination fired by the voices you don't hear in Tolstoy, and she came up with a crisp, ingenious way of linking these different pieces. Australian actress Robin McLeavy plays the wife, and West plays not her jealous husband but her (supposed) lover.
They reprise two different versions of their relationship, one punctuating the ACO's performance of the Beethoven; the other threaded through, and shedding new light on, the Janacek.
West, 44, is only in Australia briefly, having come straight from performing Caryl Churchill's A Number in the West End with his father, Timothy West (his mother is Prunella Scales, aka Mrs Basil Fawlty). He listens to ''lots of techno'', classical jazz and some opera, but his great love is chamber music, particularly ''the big central European composers''.
''This is going to sound really wanky, forgive me,'' he says, trying to explain. He remembers working on Cosi Fan Tutte, for the English National Opera, when it was, of course, a great privilege to hear Mozart every morning. ''But you sort of have to put yourself in the right mood to listen to Mozart. What I find with Janacek or Schoenberg or Bartok is that they don't care what mood you're in, they will put you in their mood. They will bring you round to their way of thinking and I find that incredibly powerful and slightly wordless,'' he says.
The power of music to link directly with the heart is discussed in a short passage in the Tolstoy, from which its title comes. It also lies at the heart of Kreutzer vs Kreutzer, a labile and contradictory thing, says West. ''Music can soothe the savage breast, but also it's the food of love, play on.'' Sometimes both at once.
Kreutzer vs Kreutzer is at the City Recital Hall, Angel Place, on Saturday, next Tuesday and Wednesday and at the Opera House on Sunday.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/music-stirs-chambers-of-the-heart-20101115-17uaq.html#ixzz1qKEl02zF

SAM WEST IN NO HURRY TO POP THE QUESTION

Sam West is reportedly in no great hurry to marry Laura Wade

Sunday August 15,2010

By Adam Helliker

While Timothy West and Prunella Scales are nearing their golden wedding anniversary, their dishy son Sam West is in no great hurry to regularise his four-year relationship with rising young playwright Laura Wade.

Sam, 43, met Sheffield-born Laura while he was artistic director of the city’s Crucible Theatre. Her last play, Posh, about the antics of an elite Oxford University dining society, was relished by acolytes of ex-Bullingdon members Boris Johnson and David Cameron.

Of course it’s possible Sam will never pop the question to Miss Wade, with whom he now lives. Despite several previous relationships he has proved elusive when it came to commitment.

A theatrical colleague who knows Sam says: “Our profession is partly to blame because it promotes a Peter Pan mentality of being forever young.”

Observes Sam’s mother Prunella (forever remembered as bossy Sybil in Fawlty Towers): “Laura is lovely and we’re hoping it will be permanent.”

20 Questions With...Samuel West

20 Questions With...Samuel West

Date: 10 December 2001

Samuel West in Hamlet

Actor Samuel West, who brings his acclaimed RSC Hamlet to London's Barbican this week, regrets not going to drama school but says he wouldn't mind taking a break from acting for awhile now.

Samuel West has been winning rave reviews at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford over the past year. First there was his Richard II, which many critics rated better than the simultaneous Almeida production starring Ralph Fiennes, and now there is his Hamlet, which this week opens the RSC's final winter season at the Barbican Centre in London.
The son of actors Timothy West (recently seen at the National in Luther) and Prunella Scales (now starring in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg in the West End), West was schooled in the ways of the theatre from an early age.
It seems appropriate then that his West End debut was in a production of A Life in the Theatre (Haymarket) opposite the late Denholm Elliott. His subsequent stage credits have included Arcadia (National), Hidden Laughter, The Sea (Chichester Festival), Mr Cinders (King's Head), The Importance of Being Earnest (Royal Exchange) and Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 (English Touring Theatre).
His film credits have included Howard's End, Notting Hill, Complicity, Carrington, Stuff Upper Lips and the upcoming Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch; while, on television, he has appeared in Hornblower, Voices in the Garden, Inspector Alleyn, Persuasion and Heavy Weather.

Date & place of birth
Born in London 19 June 1966.
Lives now in...
Islington, North London.
Professional training
I never went to Drama School - my biggest regret. Making a complete tit of yourself in front of people who don't care is probably the best learning experience an actor can have.
First big break
At the time, it should have been A Life in the Theatre with Denholm Elliot at the Haymarket, but audiences were generally underwhelmed. After that, the film Howard's End. I'm a very bad snooker player - I keep planning big breaks and missing the first shot.
Career highlights to date
Being part of two very happy companies at the RSC, having anything at all to do with Persuasion, and saying "Thirty seconds to computer achieving full power status, Mistress" to Kate O'Mara in the last-ever episode of Doctor Who.
Favourite production you've ever worked on
Richard II last year, because it changed some people's minds about the play, continued to grow up to and beyond its last night, and wasn't nearly as long as Hamlet.
Favourite co-star
David Troughton in the above, because he taught me you should never be afraid to try a new thing, and never apologise when it goes wrong.
Favourite director
Steven Pimlott, for being the only one ever to employ me twice (in Richard II and now Hamlet). Also for being confident enough to listen to others and sometimes act on their suggestions, and for having the patience and determination to do whatever it takes to turn his actors into a company.
Favourite playwright
I have to say Tom Stoppard because as long as I live I'll never be in any new play as brilliant or inspiring as Arcadia. At the moment, I'm very jealous of those RSC actors who get to be in The Prisoner's Dilemma by David Edgar, which blew me sideways.
What role would you most like to play still?
Hamlet again: "No matter; try again. Fail again; fail better" (Beckett)
What's the best thing currently on stage?
The Prisoner's Dilemma, as before. The only play I've seen recently that assumes its audience is intelligent, demands that they keep up and refuses trite moralising. The writing is particularly telling in the current international situation, but perhaps great writing always is.
What advice would you give the government to secure the future of British theatre?
I think funding the arts is a necessary part of a society that would like to call itself civilised. Funding should be seen as investment, not giveaway. A government that is serious about theatre as a forum for debate and not just a place where the jam-making classes can go and have their prejudices gently teased, should try some or all of the following:

Wipe out all regional theatres' debt accumulated through years of under-investment and no fault of their own.

Invest enough in established companies for them to be able to plan work several seasons ahead and not waste time and money reapplying to ACE every year.

Since actors trained on stage often go on to success on film and pay back more in tax than it ever cost to fund their training, give mandatory tuition and maintenance grants to all those who get places at accredited Drama Schools so they can concentrate on their course and not exhaust themselves with bar work.

Set LEA grants at a level where an evening at a subsidised theatre costs no more than an evening at the cinema.

Invest enough to enable a proportion of all tickets to sold-out shows to be given away free to under 25s.

Set up an e-mail network where unsold seats are offered free to schools, and pay the coach drivers and teachers to get them to the theatre. The generation that grew up on affordable repertory is dying, and there may not be another to take its place.
If you could swap places with one person (living or dead), who would it be?
I'd like to swap places with any Wimbledon FC player ever. A recurring dream is pulling on the yellow-and-blue just for one Saturday afternoon. And Vinny Jones's Hamlet at the matinee would have to be seen...
Favourite holiday destination
I have to say the Galapagos Islands, because I've just returned from the best holiday of my life there. Closer to home, West Cornwall, the stocking-toe of England.
Favourite book
It's often the one I'm reading at the time (currently, Atonement by Ian McEwan). But the one under the pillow is Shakespeare's Complete Works. It's the only book I know will never bore me.
Favourite websites
Am I allowed two? The International Dialects of English Archive - invaluable for audiobook homework. And The Surrey Stick Figure Theatre of Death - absolutely no use for homework at all.
Favourite joke
A man goes into a bar and orders a beer. As he drinks it, he hears a tiny voice saying "Mmm, nice tie". He looks around but can't see anything and goes back to his beer. Another tiny voice says "Yes, nice shirt too". He stops again, but again he can't find the source. The barman's walking past and the man stops him and says "Excuse me, ever since I've been in your bar I've heard little voices saying nice things about my clothes. Can you tell me what's going on?" "Yes of course, sir," replies the barman. "It's the peanuts. They're complimentary."
What impact has having actors as parents had on your career?
It's meant inheriting quite a strong streak of self-criticism and a certain insider knowledge. The encouragement about balances out the breast-beating. As for whether it's helped me get work, who can say? I've been offered auditions because of who my parents are, but never, to my knowledge, jobs.
If you hadn't become an actor, what would you have done professionally?
I would probably have become a director. I still hope to. Quite a lot of me still wants to be a train driver. Or a DJ.
Why did you want to accept this part in this production?
Are you kidding? When someone offers you Hamlet at the RSC, you say yes. Because I was already in the company and working with the director, it was as unscary as such a scary leap could be, so a better offer was impossible.
Whose is the best Hamlet you've ever seen? How do you make such a famous role your own?
Mark Rylance, Mk I (RSC 1989, Ron Daniels) is still my favourite. I hope mine's half as brilliant and funny. I think trying to make a part your own is a sure way to screw it up. You must of course, make your own sense of it, but your job is to play the part the production requires you to play - which will be influenced by your own character and those of your cast, director and "the age and body of the time". But it must lead you - if you arrive at rehearsal determined to fit the part to your idea of it, you will never be surprised by where it takes you. However, it does help to forget your preconceptions of the play, and how famous it is, and how in love with the leading character we all were for hundreds of years. Looked at unsentimentally, Hamlet's a childish, self-obsessed melancholic with a fetish for maggots.
What's your favourite line from Hamlet?
"Who's there?" (I.i.1) Has any play ever begun better?
What, if anything, makes performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company special for you?
It is special - without a doubt the happiest (and hardest) time of my professional life so far. Now Simon (Russell Beale)'s finished at the National, I'm the only person in the world playing Hamlet (in English) for a whole year. It's a rare privilege, and it teaches you a lot. At a time when fashion says it's cool not to care about what you say, 18 months talking 400 year-old verse certainly retrains your mouth. A company dedicated to work like this feels curiously revolutionary. And there is no greater happiness than being inside something greater than the sum of its parts. Team before self, every time.
What are your plans for the future?
I'd like to start a company and direct its shows. I don't mind not doing any more acting for a while, though I am playing a serial killer on Waking the Dead for the BBC. Hamlet kills three people himself and another four by proxy, so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

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Hamlet, directed by Steven Pimlott, opens at the Barbican Theatre on 11 December 2001 (following previews from 6 December) and continues until 2 April 2002. The production first opened in May 2001 in Stratford and then visited Newcastle before transferring to London

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