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.

---

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

Whats On Stage Interview

Sum of Sam

Sum of Sam

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.'

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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.
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

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4726876/Sum-of-Sam.html

That Hamlet moment

That Hamlet moment

Doubt, cynicism, moral confusion ... Sam West has no trouble getting into the mood for his next role. He talks to Lyn Gardner

• The Guardian, Wednesday 28 March 2001

The media likes to portray actors as rather dim, decorative things. But all genuinely interesting actors bring a large dollop of intelligence to their roles. The great ones match brainpower with instinct: part of what they do is as mysterious to them as it is to us watching.
Watching Sam West play Richard II for the Royal Shakespeare Company last year, you caught a glimpse of that. West's Richard was a man too bright and aware to be the kind of king he was born to be. His tragedy was to discover that divine right is a prison. Only in death does he finally behave like a king. West made you understand the tragedy of that journey.
It was an astonishing performance, given that his previous Shakespearean experience amounted to playing Hal in Henry IV and Octavius in the National's derided Anthony and Cleopatra. His reward is now to get a crack at Hamlet, a man who you could say is too intelligent for his own good.
As the son of Timothy West and Prunella Scales, Sam West has acting in his blood, yet he fears he may be too naturally analytical to be an actor. "I have a talent; I don't think that I have a gift for it," he says. "Those that have a real gift are often unashamedly subjective in their approach. They are not interested in talking about The Cherry Orchard in general because as far as they are concerned the play is about Dunyasha or whoever it is they are playing. I admire that. But I am not like that at all. I take the view that doing your homework can't do any harm. I want to know everything about the world of the play."
It shows. When West arrives from rehearsals for Steven Pimlott's RSC production of Hamlet, he proceeds to give a dazzling masterclass. It is hard to get a word in as he dissects the play, quoting not just his own part but everyone else's, and throwing in little asides on 17th century Catholic and Protestant theological attitudes to revenge and redemption. Before long he is demolishing the critical Tower of Babel that surrounds the play and analysing some of the 20-odd productions that he has seen.
It sounds more like a director talking. West laughs, admits that he can get carried away and points out that he directed his own production of Hamlet for the RSC's fringe festival last summer. "In the absence of better solutions, I will be nicking some things from that," says West. He admits that it took him a while to adjust from directing the play to being in it. "I find myself thinking more and more like a director, and I know I have to watch that. You do have to make a choice. You can't be an actor and a director, especially not at the same time."
He is enjoying being part of the RSC, after what he admits were "too many years in TV limbo" playing damaged upper-class people in the Merchant Ivory mould. "In TV and film I am already considered old at 34, while in theatre it is possible to be at the start of a classical career, although I am wary of saying that. I love it that in the theatre you get employed because people think that you have the potential to play a role, whereas in TV and film they only cast you because they know that you can do it.
"A friend, the actor Leigh Lawson, said to me that the only time in his career when he didn't feel he should be somewhere else doing something else was when he was with the RSC. It has been like that for me. I find it moving that I've spent a year in a company of young actors speaking 400-year-old language with no apology and an almost revolutionary zeal. The zeitgeist is so much about not caring, about it being cool to mumble and be back footed. But you can't do that when you are speaking verse, and there is something that makes you feel happy to know that you are going out there and giving people pleasure." He pauses. "Small dollops of pleasure. The number of people who will have seen Richard II during its entire run is smaller than the Saturday afternoon gate at Cardiff City."
If West has one regret about doing Hamlet now, it is that we are living in a Hamlet age. "It must have been thrilling to have been David Warner and played Hamlet in a Lear age, a world where you've got something to kick against," he sighs. He is referring to the 1965 production that cast Warner as a spokesman for a generation that was challenging the entrenched views of its parents. But what exactly is a Hamlet age?
"A Tony Blair age," says West. "If Tony Blair isn't good casting for Claudius who smiles and smiles, who is? Oh yes, this is very much a Hamlet age. Doubts, cynicism, moral relativism, these are the norms now. It is hard to notice the bitterness in Denmark because there is so much sugar coating the pill. Hamlet is a character that exists in opposition, but it is hard to stand up to something that seems quite liberal. He is a man for our times because he distrusts himself. He is a worrier, not a warrior. Steven Pimlott described the play the other day as being like Gladiator with Woody Allen playing Russell Crowe. That's about the measure of it."
• Hamlet previews at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon from Saturday. Box office: 01789 403403.