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.

Newcastle revives Alan Plater's 'Close the Coalhouse Door'

Posted by

Alan Sykes

Thursday 12 April 2012

Big audiences expected for Sam West and Lee Hall's version of the classic which had to have its run extended five times when miners packed it out in 1968. Alan Sykes has bought tickets.

Chris Conel sings the title song in rehearsals for Close the Coalhouse Door.
It's on the English A-level syllabus these days. Photograph: Topher McGillis/Northern Stage

 





Samuel West in rehearsals for the new production.
Photograph: Topher McGillis/Northern Stage



For the original Newcastle Playhouse production of "Close the Coalhouse Door" in 1968, bus loads of miners would come in from the pit villages of County Durham and Northumberland, and forced the play's run to be extended five times. It was written by Alan Plater, based on his friend and mentor Sid Chaplin's mining stories, and with music by Alex Glasgow – all three of them born in the County Durham mining area.

Samuel West, who is directing the new version which opens at Northern Stage this Friday, thinks its popularity back then was partly because

in 1968 people in the North East hadn't seen themselves on stage very much and it spoke to them in their own language and with song and humour and it spoke to them about something they cared about and that ran through them like rock.

Adam Barlow rehearsing; not as relaxing
 a play as it looks.
Photograph: Topher McGillis/Northern Stage

This time round the popularity (and the production is already not far from a sell-out in Newcastle) is likely to be caused by a mixture of local pride tinged with nostalgia. There is no doubt that there is an audience – Live Theatre's 2007 production of Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters was originally only supposed to run for six weeks, and, after two runs at the National Theatre, is still playing in London's West End, as well as having clocked up tours to the rest of England, Broadway and, in a Spanish version called "Mineros", is on at the Metropolitan Theatre in Buenas Aires.

Previous revivals of "Close the Coalhouse Door" had been updated by Plater himself – for the Leeds version of 1974 he remembered doing some of the re-writes by candlelight during a power-cut caused by the three day week. However, because of Plater's death in 2010, Lee Hall was set the task of bringing the version up to date, including references to the miners' strike of 1984-5. As a close friend and protégé of Alan Plater's, he stressed that the adaptations he has made are like "keyhole surgery" –

I didn't want to write Lee Hall's version of this. I'm not trying to impose anything because I was really trying to think "what would Alan do? What would Alan do?"

In the Bloodaxe Books edition of the play, Plater wrote

 The soul of the piece is unchanging. We originally described it as "a hymn of unqualified praise to the miners – who created a revolutionary weapon without having a revolutionary intent." If, today, the hymn is more in the nature of an elegy, it is a strain that haunts the dreams of everyone with roots in the North East.



A final peep at rehearsals: Tarek Merchant.



As well as being elegiac it is, like most of Plater's work, richly humorous - Max Roberts, Live Theatre's artistic director and director of the play's 1994 revival, and of many of Plater's other works, says of him: "All the scripts I directed possessed a delightful anarchy along with a genuine, heartfelt, humanist concern. I truly believe he was one of the finest comic writers of the 20th Century".

Alan Plater's Close the Coalhouse Door is co-produced by Live Theatre and Northern Stage. It runs in Newcastle, Richmond (Surrey), Salford, Huddersfield, Guildford, Durham, Oxford and York, until June 30th.

Keith Pattison's No Redemption exhibition of photographs of the 1984-5 miners' strike accompanies the play in Newcastle.

The Guardian

Still a rich seam: reviving Close the Coalhouse Door

It had songs, jokes and politics – and was a hit with intellectuals and miners. Playwright Lee Hall on the thrill of bringing Close the Coalhouse Door to 21st-century audiences

• Lee Hall
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 March 2012 18.30 BST

Geraldine Moffatt, Alan Browning and Dudley Foster in a BBC adaptation
of Close the Coalhouse Door. Photograph: BBC/BBC Pictures Archives

 

In 1968, an ex-ballet-dancing, now theatre-directing, son of a miner called Bill Hays gathered the emerging playwright Alan Plater with the founding father of north-east working-class writing, the ex-miner Sid Chaplin; his aim was to create a show that would be "an unqualified hymn of praise to the miners". Rounding off the group was Alex Glasgow, a brilliant songwriter, famous for his hilarious, sardonic songs that – although virtually all written in the Geordie vernacular – were part Brecht, part Brassens and part Tom Lehrer.

(Hays and Plater, who had met while working on the groundbreaking BBC show Z Cars, would go on to create some of the most loved and provocative TV of the 1970s and beyond.) Chaplin was already a major figure through his groundbreaking work, which told of working-class life from the point of view of a working-class person. The show this group created, Close the Coalhouse Door, became a landmark of post-war regional theatre.
Inspired by Joan Littlewood's success with Oh! What A Lovely War, the group wanted to use the tools of working-class entertainment – music hall, vaudeville, drinking songs and coarse humour – to tell the more politicised story of mining in the north east; or, more accurately, the popular unionised resistance to the incredible exploitation that had marred its history since the industrial revolution. It was an audacious task: could anything be more potentially boring, worthy and of limited local interest?
But the show they created, originally scheduled for a modest run of a few weeks, caused a sensation. The shock that a theatre might have a play that was not only a "good night out", but which also told the people's history from the people's perspective, was pretty much unheard of. The run was extended again and again. The car park was packed every night with coaches hired by miners from pit villages across the north. who were flocking to see the show in their thousands. You could spot the miners in the audience: they were all dressed immaculately in suits and ties, while the scruffy, leftish intelligentsia stuck out like sore thumbs. But for once, here was a show that satisfied both.
Six months after it opened, it went on the road, first to Nottingham, then to the West End; a triumphant run, but Newcastle was bereft without it. Over the next five years, there were three further productions, and it has since been revived regularly. Ironically, the play has proved more resilient than the monumental industry it critiqued.
As something of a specialist in the dramatic portrayal of miners (having written Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters), I was recently asked by the actor and director Sam West to help shape a new revival. (The late Alan Plater was a good friend of mine, and very much a mentor.) At first, I worried that what was once a celebration would seem like an elegy; but on closer examination, far from being an exercise in nostalgia, the play is more urgent than ever. As the specifics of the mining story have started to recede, the themes of popular resistance and the necessity, efficacy and cost of that struggle seem like a rebuke to our current quietism.
The play is anything but rousing agitprop. It is delicate, ironic and fraught with ambivalence, which, in my view, marks the best political art. It itemises economic crisis after crisis over the last 200 years, making it impossible to ignore the fact that what we are facing today is just the latest in a litany of such occasions: where external events are conveniently used to impoverish the majority.
The play today is no longer a hymn of praise to a dirty industry. It is a paean to generations of people in England who stood up to manifest injustice and often faced state-sanctioned gunfire, eviction and the draconian economic hardships. Clearly this is not an old story. This is a play for the age of Occupy and riots in Greece. As one of the first reviewers insisted, the play is about how history's slaves fought back. We can now see the struggle remains the same even if its specific industrial context has changed beyond recognition. The real question it asks is: what do we do now?

Stories to make you laugh or cry

Stories to make you laugh or cry

Wednesday 29 February 2012

It was a night for passions at the Tabernacle on Wednesday evening. The passion for storytelling, the passion for poetry, and the passion for individuality of voice were celebrated in this very special event organised by Intelligence² in support of First Story. William Fiennes, Founding Director of First Story, kicked the event off with a very personal account of the origins of the charity and how he was blown away by the creative energy he found in an unexpected place. Salena Godden moved between the bittersweet and downright hilarious in her account of growing up black in the harsh terrain of her Northern comprehensive. Then the actor, Sam West, supplied a little RSC magic with a mesmerizing reading of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. Lemn Sissay exposed a dark chapter in our recent history but commanded laughter along with the tears. Mark Haddon revealed how he breaks from his writing pattern to enjoy a Thames dip three times a week, but when it came to flying he was a fish out of water. The evening culminated with First Story student Mohamed Mardadi’s hypnotic performance of two of his own works, including ‘I Remember’, an account of his first years in England after moving from Africa and the hostility towards the Islamic faith he has encountered since September 11th. His extraordinary rhyming energy earned a rapturous applause. A star is born.

It was a tremendous night for First Story and we would like to thank everyone who supported the event and we hope they took away as many fond memories as we did.

First Story - Stories To Make You Laugh or Cry

Sam West, Star of Eternal Law – We’ve Lost the Link Between Effort & Reward

Sam West, Star of Eternal Law – We’ve Lost the Link Between Effort & Reward By Alison Jane Reid

by Alison Jane Reid on February 16, 2012

Just who is actor Sam West? In a galaxy of one dimensional, pretty boy actors, West is hard to define or to pigeonhole. He acts, directs, tinkers with politics and goes off to Palestine to conduct The London Choir in the Magic Flute. To that you can add that he is an un-repenting atheist, ‘and doesn’t care who knows it’. Yet he is currently, and very happily, playing an angel, in ITV’s bold new drama – Eternal Law – with a delicious mix of charm, cynicism and masculine vulnerability; oh and a pair of wings to lust after – which have a tendency to ‘pop out at very awkward moments – like an unwanted erection’, explains Sam. The latest offering from Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham – the writers on Life on Mars – Eternal Law is whacky, whimsical and makes very good television. I am sure it will be a hit, and that it will deliver Sam West many new admirers, most of them I suspect – women.

The truth is Samuel Alexander Joseph West belongs to the great, British, swashbuckling, politically incorrect and imperfectly talented tradition of Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Richard Burton. He thinks and worries far too much about the human condition: about beauty, politics, the death of British manufacturing, sex – lots and lots of sex, lest he miss out! – And yes, bird watching (Of which more later) and the peerless, incomparable beauty of the steam engine. He also uses the word ‘fecund’ a lot.
West is clearly talented, so why isn’t he a first-degree Hollywood star? He was very good as Anthony Blunt in Cambridge Spies and his performance in Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company garnered an award for Best Shakespearean Performance. My guess is that it’s because he doesn’t really care to be; he has too many other facets to his life that he enjoys more. Nor does he have the soft, bland, conformist perfection that Hollywood currently craves for its leading men.
Somehow, his features just seem wrong, if not a little outré. Take that mop of unruly, chorister boy curls, and those strong, aquiline features that can make him sometimes look rather fierce and cross on screen. Remember him as Julia Robert’s cold, gossipy, patrician leading man in Notting Hill? What he does possess is animal magnetism – you only have to look on film forums to see how he inspires such devotion in his female fans.
Now back to Eternal Law. In a piece of inspired casting and a superb, madcap, silly, affirming homage to Powell and Pressburger’s delicious A matter of Life and Death – West is finally cast as a leading man, and he doesn’t disappoint. He acts everyone else off the screen as JAK GIST, a deliciously cynical, wise-cracking, world-weary lawyer who has another secret life as an angel, dispatched to earth to clean up the lives of messy humans, when his own life is just as complex, and he can’t be with the woman he is mad for. At last, West has never looked more appealing or quite so fallible; hanging out on the very telegenic pinnacles of York Minster, be-suited, cigar and whisky in hand, and flexing a fine pair of lusciously downy, anatomically correct wings, complete with all the primary feathers – forget vampires! The angelic life is hot.
And so I predict is Sam West. Soon we will have the fascinating opportunity to compare West’s portrait of George V1, with Colin Firth’s Oscar-winning turn in the King’s Speech. West is taking on the shy monarch with a life-long stutter, for his role in Hyde Park on Hudson in the film about the love affair between Franklin D Roosevelt and his distant cousin directed by Roger Mitchell.
When we meet for the launch of Eternal Law, Sam has forty minutes to spare before dashing into town to put the finishing touches to a paper he has written ‘ attacking the Coalition government on the cuts to arts funding’. I detect he rather relishes all this. Then, in a few days time he is off to Newcastle to take a boat trip down the Tyne in preparation to direct Close the Coalhouse Door, a play about the HISTORY OF THE DURHAM MINERS, by Alan Plater.

‘ I’m going up for a little meeting about the play next week, and one of the first things I am going to do is take a boat down the Tyne. There are huge piles of coals on the Tyne – coals to Newcastle – but they are Romanian. So we have exported the union problems and the unpaid labour, and the danger to Russia and Columbia. Meanwhile, there are public sector workers who have just had a pay frieze, lots of ex-miners, and seventy five percent of the coal is still in the ground, and nobody is making anything; it does feel wrong.’
Somehow, I can’t imagine the new pretty boy pack of Brit actors even knowing about the miners strike, or caring; let alone being interested in anything other than the name of their dermatologist and the size of their next pay cheque.
West is complex, interesting, and has lovely manners, and speaks in a tone of mellifluous, rather beautiful, received English. He is also full of fascinating contradictions. He is the son of actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales. In fact he tells me “ I do know The Lady Magazine well. My mother has advertised in the magazine for nannies and housekeepers since before I was born.’
He was educated at Alleyn’s, a private school in Dulwich, and he went on to Lady Margaret Hall Oxford, where he read English Literature. When he broke the news to his parents that he wanted to act, they suggested that becoming a plumber might be a better career. He didn’t listen. On screen he frequently plays, toffs, aristocrats and royalty with ease and aplomb, and yet, he is no Tory. In his twenties, he was briefly a member of the Socialist Workers Party, and he maintains a life long passion and interest in politics and socialism.
Twice a year, since he was seventeen years old, Sam takes the sleeper, around midnight from Paddington to Penzance, ‘a whisky in hand until Reading, at which point he retires to his bunk’. He adds that if he times things just right, ‘ I wake to the view of St Michael’s Mount.’ He then spends a very happy, contented few days cooking, washing up piles of dishes and generally grafting behind the scenes at the International Musicians Seminar in Prussia Cove.
Why, I ask him does he feel the need to do that?
For the first time in the interview, he grows very quiet, and almost becomes tongue-tied.
Is it the contrast between thinking and physical grafting?
‘Yes, it is partly that. I just like washing up… actually I don’t like washing up. But if you have a team of five washing up together, and you get to the end, it is enormously satisfying.’
I said West is complicated.

West’s trips to Penzance, also, happily coincide with the main spring and autumn migration patterns. Originally, he was inspired to study the birds, after a trip to Kenya in his teens to visit his uncle who was a solider working for the British liaison force out in Africa.
‘ I went out on safari, and looked into their garden, and I just loved the fact that birds were either four inches long and bright blue, or seven feet tall and couldn’t fly. It wasn’t too difficult to get the mixed up. I’ve also subsequently discovered that Nairobi is the most fecund city in the world for birds.’
But the years went buy, and he didn’t seriously take up twitching until he took over from Michael Grandage as artistic director of the Sheffield Theatres, a job he candidly describes as ‘reasonably stressful’.
‘ I lived eight miles from the middle of a grouse moor. So at six in the morning, I could just bomb west, and go for a walk before breakfast. And although the birdlife on a moor isn’t amazing, it was the first time I had lived anywhere near the country, as I grew up in south London; and it took me out of myself in a way I found completely captivating.
‘There is also the slightly nerdy, boyish need to catalogue things, to list things. I used to be a train spotter, and very proud one too. My dad had a great interest in trains around the same age. There is something enormously beautiful about steam trains, and the fact that we made them. I do worry very much that we’ve lost the connection between effort and reward that comes from making things. I also think we don’t know how things are made, if we don’t make them ourselves. David Nobbs, who I follow on twitter, said something very funny recently. He said, ‘ a lot of middleclass people regret the loss of menial jobs they wouldn’t last ten minutes in’, which I am sure is true.
‘ Nevertheless,’ he argues, Sheffield is a very good example of this decline. ‘It used to be a city that made things; now it is a city that sells things. And it’s losing its memory. It may be a very nice city; it is certainly cleaner, and there are more fountains. But there is something about the satisfaction of producing things with your hands, the sense of achievement, and pride and indeed all of that.’
West is certainly complicated but the one thing he isn’t is a hypocrite. When he says there is satisfaction in using your hands he means it.
When he isn’t washing up, he goes bird watching. ‘ There’s this valley near Land’s End. It ‘s called Cop Valley – and it must be the most beautiful setting in Britain. It’s like Rivendale. It’s this incredibly damp, warm valley, and the birds are amazing. The chances of seeing a real rarity are quite high, and even if they aren’t, you get lots of black caps and white caps, and spring and autumn migrants, singing, and the weather is wonderful.

‘Going birding gives me a completely different attitude to the year. Now I see the seasons as heralding different, migratory birds. Instead of November and it’s freezing, I think it’s November and the geese have arrived. Migration is one of the great mysteries of nature.’
Several days after interviewing Sam West, I stumbled across this quote from him on his entry for IMDB – the leading information site for filmmakers and actors.
‘Oliver Reed regretted not sleeping with every woman in the world, and Betjeman said he wished he’d had more sex. It doesn’t matter how much sex I have, I’ll be of Olli Reed’s mind when it comes down to it. And so will anybody who is honest.’
I would say that Sam West is a man who frets and thinks and lusts after life – keen to fill up everyday with meaning, purpose and experience – and what’s wrong with that?
Eternal Law is on ITV every Thursday at 9pm. It is repeated on www.itv.com
Close the Coalhouse Door Opens in April to book – www. northernstage.co.uk
Alison Jane Reid – Copyright January 2012
Download PDF of this Sam West Interview for The Lady Magazine Published February 2012

The Ethical Hedonist

Inside the Index: public funding

The National Campaign for the Arts and Sam West

Tuesday 17 January 2012

In the week the UK Arts Index goes open access, NCA trustee Sam West offers the first of five detailed digests of its findings

Consumer takes money from a purse Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

 

When the National Campaign for the Arts launched the UK Arts Index at the House of Commons in December – calling it 'an annual health-check for the arts' – it was not just a sound bite.

The arts body is a complex system where collaboration across disciplines, public-private cross-fertilisation and the relatively small size of the UK combine to produce a healthy whole. And like any complex system, there are different ways of measuring how well it's working.
We've chosen 20 measures. We call them indicators. They measure the stuff that goes in, like investment, and the stuff that comes out, like audience size. They can go up or down, and they're measured against a base year: in this case 2007/8. From now on we have a yardstick. It allows us to put figures on the cultural, financial and social benefits of the arts, and it tells this story across the regions, across the four UK nations and across the whole country.

I suspect I'm not alone in thinking one aspect of the Index feels dodgy – the idea that art can ever be reduced to a set of figures. Of course it can't. It's a subjective thing. We must resist attempts to 'mark' it and be on guard against a return to target-driven art. We mustn't let the budget tail wag the artistic dog, either – the most important thing about a good idea is not how much it costs.

If art is worth anything, it's worth funding for its own sake. But as responsible citizens and conscientious receivers of public investment, we can prove our worth to the UK economy. We can play our part in its recovery. The Arts Index allows us to do that.
How do we use it? It gives power to the elbows of those who lobby for the arts. It lets commissioners, policymakers and arts organisations see the effect arts have as they plan for their future. Perhaps most importantly, it's an independent and objective measure; the first of its kind in this country.

We took the idea from the US, where Americans for the Arts have been producing a National Arts Index for more than a decade. It was compiled by Audiences London in partnership with Audiences UK – we're very grateful to them.

Today we start our series of five articles with a look at what the Arts Index can tell us about public funding.

Public funding

The Index includes three indicators that measure public money: treasury funding, local government funding and lottery funding. From 2007/8 to 2009/10 we see stable levels of Arts Council England (ACE) and local authority funding combined with extra lottery funds to mitigate recession. Their average taken across the three years shows a small increase, almost all down to increased money from the lottery.

There was no change in public funding between 2007/08 and 2008/09 and an increase of 5% (£1.04 per person) in 2009/10, from £21.52 in 2008/9 to £22.56 in 2009/10. The jump in the lottery figure for 2009/10 comes from ACE's Sustain programme, a £40m lottery fund for organisations under pressure as a result of the recession. This will not be repeated.

I've written before about the advantages of public investment in the arts and the dangers of so-called "philanthro-capitalism" and I won't re-run those arguments here. Suffice to say that we believe the continuing health of the arts from 2008-2010 came from stable levels of public funding. The confidence this gives the sector is impossible to over-emphasise. While public funding was stable, the overall Index was constant. Importantly, the 2011 Index pre-dates widespread cuts in arts funding made during 2010/11. The 2012 Index will help measure the impact of the "double squeeze" already taking effect during 2011.

Across the nations, we can see that the recession hit the arts more deeply in other parts of the UK than in England. In Scotland, the overall Index score drops from 121 in 2007/08 to 85 in 2009/10 (and the lottery funding score from 284 to just 41).

http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/visualizations/national-indicators-of-arts-fundin-3/comments/f4fa5e74403d11e195bc000255111976

Interactive: click on the graphic below to see some of the Index's funding data visualised comparatively
Among the regions, London's dominant position is eroded slightly over the three years (its overall score falls from 292 in 2007/08 to 226 in 2009/10, while other regional scores increase) but it is still hugely far ahead. It gets more public money than any other region (an average score of 265 for treasury funding for instance, more than two and a half times bigger than the next largest regional score). The narrowing of the gap between London and the other regions is less to do with a redistribution of public funds, which have remained fairly constant, than the effect of recession on the other indicators.
The East of England scores are lowest, largely because of low investment, particularly from public funders. The region has the second lowest contributions from Treasury funds (£1.89 per person, compared to £22.43 per person in London in 2009/10) and local government, and the lowest contribution from the Lottery (£1.15 compared to £4.00 in London in the same year).
Local government funding has similar inequalities; from £11.64 per person in the West Midlands in 2008/9 to £6.85 in the South West.
The big story is that the first Arts Index shows the effect of sustained public investment over many years – a healthy, profitable, vital sector. Many of the figures in the first edition look good, so we were delighted but not surprised when, at the launch, all three party spokespeople welcomed it. This edition takes us to the eve of and local government cuts.
We hope the arts continue to show robust health. But if they don't, and the recession really begins to bite, we must use the Index as an argument for change. If we are going to allow a generous government to trumpet their triumphs and a squeezed sector to complain about their cuts, both sides must speak fluent Index.

This article is the first in a five part series. Next week: private funding. The first UK Arts Index can be downloaded here. The second edition of the Index will be published in April 2012

The Arts Index was produced in collaboration with Audiences UK, Audiences London and with help from Americans for the Arts, Arts and Business, Arts Council England, Arts Council of Wales, Arts Council Northern Ireland and The Department for Culture, Media & Sport

Samuel West is an actor, director and NCA trustee. Follow the NCA on Twitter @artscampaign and Sam's personal account @exitthelemming

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, sign up free to become a member of the Culture Professionals Network.

The Guardian - Inside The Index

Sam West embodies luvvie stupidity about arts funding

Sam West embodies luvvie stupidity about arts funding

9 April 2011

‘We’re asked to console with each tremulous soul who steps out to be loudly applauded. Stars on opening nights weep when they see their names in lights. Though people who act, as a matter of fact, are financially amply rewarded, it seems while pursuing their calling their suffering is simply appalling.’
The mummers couldn’t deceive Noel Coward. The Master knew all their ways, for he lived among them, as dramatist, actor, director and — as we have seen — songwriter. What a shame he’s not still with us, for the furore surrounding the ‘savage cuts’ announced last week by the Arts Council of England might have prompted him to add a few more humorous verses about the vanity of certain thesps.
Not all; by no means. Most actors learn their lines, put on the greasepaint, and toddle off to their digs to see, in the time-honoured phrase, if the landlady’s daughter obliges. But some want us to know how much they suffer for their art, and they want us to suffer, too. Had he been around last week Coward would almost certainly have found much to chortle at in the absurd preening of Sam West, for whom the diminished Arts Council subsidy to theatre was not the result of Gordon Brown’s financial incontinence. Heavens no, it was all ‘ideologically motivated’.
He told the Guardian: ‘The Conservatives are frightened of anything that educates and enlightens people — such as theatre. They want to preserve the social distinctions that exist between the rich and poor.’ These are not, you may note, the words of a frothing teenager. They belong to a man of 44 who attended Alleyn’s School in Dulwich and Oxford University where, no doubt, he acquired that grand manner.
West is a perfectly good actor and, having met him a couple of times, I should add that he is a decent man. If you were looking for a well-spoken, public-school-educated performer to don a wing collar and deliver lines like ‘I say, old bean, what are you driving at?’ he’s just the chap. But, like all members of his tribe, he makes a poor spokesman for the oppressed; in this case those poor souls who, having been deprived of their cultural inheritance by the vile penny-pinching Tories, will never now see the curtain rise.
With a predictability that was almost comic in its righteousness, Guardian writers endorsed West’s daft remarks. Charlotte Higgins, the earnest lady on the arts beat, wrote of ‘the crude, unthinking vandalism to the English cultural landscape’. Yes, all over the land, hour by hour, theatres and concert halls have been put to the torch! Polly Toynbee, never one to be outblubbed, also used the V word. The Tories, she howled, peeling her daily onion, were undoing all the glorious work of Labour, whose years in office had brought ‘a golden era to the arts’.
And there, with a finality that is breathtaking in its arrogance, is the heart of this matter. In the world according to West, amplified by Toynbee, taking sides is easy-peasy. We are virtuous; they are selfish. We are altruistic; they couldn’t spell the word. We are progressive; they are reactionary. We open doors; they place guards outside, to keep out the riff-raff. We care; they couldn’t care less.
‘Brain-dead liberals’, David Mamet calls them, and you have to admit that phrase sums up West rather nicely. It would be wonderful if every town supported a theatre, and, for that matter, an art gallery and a concert hall. In Germany, where government is federal, and where people on the whole have a keener appreciation of the performing arts, that is often the case. But facts have a habit of tripping up the unwary. If the theatres of Exeter and Derby, two big losers in the latest Arts Council handout, go out of business, it may be because not enough people in those cities want the theatres to exist. You can’t compel folk to attend shows. On the other hand, if theatres do good work, and people turn up, there is every chance that they will prosper. The Theatre by the Lake in Keswick and the Arcola in north London were both handsomely rewarded by the ACE. So it can be done. West did it himself, when he ran the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.
The BDLs, as we may call them, give the game away with their choice of adjectives. They talk of programmes being bold, daring, innovative, edgy and, when they are feeling particularly naughty, seminal. This is not the language of the artist. It is drivel that falls from the mouths of social engineers. Toynbee more or less admits it when she claims that ‘the most avid consumers of conventional theatre and opera still look white, middle-aged and middle-class’. In other words they look much like Polly Toynbee of Clapham and Tuscany. A toothsome little wine, isn’t this, Polly? Oh, ra-ther!
Of course most people who attend the theatre and opera are, by any reasonable judgment, middle-class. That is no less true of audiences in continental Europe. If you think Covent Garden is posh, try the opera in Munich or Vienna! Most people who buy good books, eat decent grub, listen to Radios 3 and 4, or, for that matter, read the Guardian, are also ‘middle-class’. It is the middle class, by and large, that protects civilisation, however much its members are assailed by the barbs of self-haters like Toynbee and West. They should be praised, not denigrated.
Oh dear, little Sam, what have you done? When you were growing up in south London, the son of distinguished and much-loved actors, did you ever imagine you would play such a public role, and inhabit it in a way that brought so many guffaws?
The title of Mr Coward’s song, by the way, asked the age-old question: Why Must The Show Go On? But it did then, it does now, and it always will. So dress up, Master West — and then shut up.

The Spectator - Acting Up

Review: A Number, Menier Chocolate Factory

Monday, 4 October 2010

Review: A Number, Menier Chocolate Factory

“You think I wouldn't know if I was your father?"

This production of Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Menier Chocolate Factory is a revival of the 2006 production in Sheffield which starred real-life father and son, Timothy West and Samuel West who reappear here with the same director in Jonathan Munby. In order to retain the integrity of the show, the Menier has been reconfigured into the round for the first time ever, something which works so well here, I hope they think about doing it again.

Coming in at 50 minutes without a break, it rips through its central debate of nature versus nurture with a side order of the ethics of cloning as it poses questions about the nature of identity. Salter is a man who, for initially unknown reasons, had his four year old son Bernard cloned. Years later, Bernard discovers that he has a cloned brother and confronts his father, but in doing so discovers that there’s ‘a number’ of the clones and thus the debate begins.

Timothy West is good as the man clinging on to the self-justification of his questionable decision, full of nervous tics but it is Samuel West who is excellent as the three sons, making the distinctions between them all crystal clear and demonstrating exactly where Churchill lies on the issue of whether people with the same genetic identity can have separate identities.

I liked Paul Wills’ starkly utilitarian design, especially the ceiling of test tubes but as with Oliver Fenwick’s lighting (I loved the scanner effect), less is more as the focus is solely on the acting. And whilst it is indeed impeccably acted, I felt there was something ultimately lacking here, a sense of emotion to go with the science. The programme features an interesting interview with the Wests and Munby which really enthused me about the potential of this show, but I must admit to not seeing much of what they talked about. So a most cerebral experience but sadly unsatisfying despite the pleasure in watching father and son revelling in each other’s talent.

Running time: 50 minutes

Programme cost: £2

Booking until 5th November

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.”

Review: Enron

Monday, 21 September 2009

Review: Enron

Premiered this summer in Chichester and now making the move to Sloane Square's Royal Court, Lucy Prebble's second play Enron has achieved a quite astonishing level of success. Bolstered by four- and five-star reviews earlier this year, the entire run at the Royal Court sold out before opening and a West-End transfer has already been announced. Fortunately, the play lived up to its billing and provided a highly entertaining and educational evening.

Telling the story of Enron, a much-feted energy corporation whose surprise collapse in 2001 leaving billions of dollars of debt, Prebble has done a fantastic job in making the subject of financial manoeuvring very accessible and engaging, whilst never patronising her audience, and her work is given extra strength due to the current state of the economy and our subsequent realisation that this was not an isolated incident as first believed.

One of the main strengths of this play is its unerring plausibility, and this is perfectly exemplified by the well-drawn characters and the performances of each of the leads. There are no pantomime villains here, no evil chuckling over bags of swag, but rather 3 businessmen making increasingly bad decisions. Tim Pigott-Smith as Enron's wily founder Ken Lay is full of backslapping southern bonhomie which belies his ruthlessness and complicity as the share price soars; Tom Goodman-Hill was highly impressive as the financial officer Andy Fastow whose inventive schemes to hide the debts are brilliantly explained in a key scene with a Russian doll-like collection of boxes; and finally Samuel West is just superb as Jeffrey Skilling, the chairman who led Enron on its merry dance. We follow him on his tumultuous journey from the overweight, gauche Harvard ingenue on his arrival, through his ruthless climb to the presidency (shafting his rival, the ever-excellent Amanda Drew), losing weight and morals as he rises to the top and then desperately trying to maintain the untenable position through ever-increasingly outlandish schemes. West imbues his performance with enough humanity so that one does end up sympathising somewhat with him, yet all-the-while remaining a thoroughly unlikeable chap.

The rest of the company also deserve a mention though, as they work extremely hard and do an excellent job: singing, dancing, playing at dinosaurs, fighting with lightsabres, all and more are carried out with aplomb and fantastic energy, the scene changes in particular were admirably swift.

Rupert Goold's direction here, particularly in the first half, is simply dazzling. Bringing together elements of song, movement and video, and weaving in highly effective lighting, sound design and a visually arresting set, the combined effect is often breathtaking. There's a strong vein of dark comedy which highlights the absurdity of what Enron was able to get away with, and whilst the energy of the play subsides slightly in the second half with the shift to a more traditional story-telling and less of the Gooldisms, the sheer quality of the acting carries it through.

This is a great play, which at any other time would have been well-received anyway due to the inventiveness of the direction and clarity in demystifying the murky pool of financial nefariousness, but its timing now and the light it sheds on the reasons for the state of the world today elevates it to outstanding. Thought-provoking and educational, but above all, highly educational: do not miss!

Cad files: Sam West turns supervillain in a new play about the collapse of energy titan Enron

Born into theatrical royalty, Sam West made his name playing 'linen' parts in Merchant Ivory productions. So how did he come to be taking on one of this century's biggest corporate villains?

 

Sunday 05 July 2009

 What must it be like to have achieved all one's ambitions? Sam West has just turned 43 and discovered he has done everything he thought he had wanted: "I've played Hamlet, been in Doctor Who and read the shipping forecast. I'm having to draw up a new list." Luckily, there is plenty he still wants to do (including the shipping forecast on Radio 4 proper, as his first go was only in a play).

When we meet, he is midway through rehearsals for his latest project, the première of Enron, by young playwright Lucy Prebble, about the collapse of the US energy giant. "Apart from being a brilliant play, the timing couldn't have been better," says West. "It was commissioned two years ago, just before the banking collapse and it comes out just when people are asking how the hell it happened."

West plays the part of Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO of Enron (the US corporation that went bankrupt in 2001 as the result of an accounting fraud) who is presently three years into a 24-year jail sentence. It's quite a departure from West's previous roles, which have included Ted Heath, Anthony Blunt and a number of other English eccentrics.

Skilling is the Machiavellian charmer from Illinois who had never run a company before Enron but discovered that as long as the share price stayed high, investors would continue to pump in money. West is fascinated by Skilling, even though their politics could not be more different. West is a former member of the Socialist Alliance, Skilling a rampant free-marketer. Yet when he talks about Skilling, West could almost be talking about himself: "What drives him? A belief in ideas. A belief in the purity of the idea. A belief in brilliance."

West has a strong moral instinct and a keen sense of injustice. He is spitting at the news that Stephen Hester, Sir Fred Goodwin's replacement at RBS, is to get a £10m package, £6.4m of which is conditional on the share price rising. "Have they learnt nothing?" he rages. "It's not socialism, just common sense to know not to reward irresponsibility at a time when banks are meant to be less risky. You can't give someone £6.4m if they hit a certain share price at the same time as letting 3,000 people go."

West has what the Prime Minister would call strong "values". It's refreshing to meet an actor more interested in politics than his own IMDB listing – though West's is impressive. His big break came when he got the part of Leonard Bast in Howards End aged 26, and he was soon in demand for period dramas including Persuasion, Jane Eyre and Carrington. "They were great fun," he says, "although one can be tarred by the linen brush."

It was that fear of becoming too used to playing parts in petticoats that prompted Helena Bonham Carter to give up Merchant Ivory dramas and go to the US, where she wowed her critics with her American accent. "People don't need any encouragement to put you in a box," admits West. "And I have been mostly lords and princes. But I would be foolish to turn my back on Merchant Ivory. You have an idea as an actor as to what you think you can play, but it's much more important to know what other people think you can play. If you get a chance to play a very different animal, in terms of their background and their country, it's delightful."

West hails from theatre royalty – his father is Timothy West, his mother Prunella Scales – but he doesn't believe he was ever given a part because of who they were. "That would be absurd. The only difficulty is that you don't quite decide to become an actor. I've just gone into the family business." Growing up with famous parents was never a problem, as he didn't know any different. "There was a time when they were big names, when mum was in Fawlty Towers and dad was in Edward VII. Occasionally I would be asked at school to get an autograph, but there was no reflective glory."

Unlike some power families, the Wests were not competitive, but rather operated with a spirit of collaboration, reading each other's reviews and seeing each other's performances. "I remember getting a review at Oxford that said I was OK but I didn't have the presence of my famous mother and father. I was playing Florizel in The Winter's Tale and my father said, 'I think that's very unfair. I mean, I would be hopeless as Florizel and Ma would be even worse.'" Rehearsing Enron has made West grateful to be an actor. "Acting is, unusually, a collaborative medium, not a competition. And I'm now involved in making a play about a company that is not a company, but a competition. As a group, we are trying to get on as well as possible so that on stage we can beat the shit out of each other."

Apart from a bit of waitering, West has never had a job beyond actor or director. He says the real stars, though, are the writers; West has never attempted to write for stage or screen himself, although he reveals he is supposed to be writing a book about how to approach a variety of roles. "It's going rather slowly. Writing isn't really my thing," he admits.

West is consistently modest about his achievements. The first play he ever directed, Hamlet at the Edinburgh Fringe, so impressed the Almeida's artistic director Michael Attenborough that he gave West a job at the theatre seven years later. His enthusiasm for regional theatre led him to take on the post of artistic director at the Crucible complex in Sheffield in 2005, although he stayed for only two terms after a disagreement with the managers – he wanted to put on plays while the theatre was closed for refurbishment, they didn't. He also found the distribution of funds frustrating. "It's no secret that marketing departments in regional theatres have grown massively while the number of actors in work has reduced," he says. "There is a fight to be had for the soul of regional theatre in this country. I suspect that the culture of over-management has reached the stage where artists are seen as slightly tiresome people who want to spend money on things that don't make profits. And if you use a monetary model, a regional theatre can be seen as very unproductive. I suspect we should be fighting for our theatres as we do our car factories."

The experience has not put him off, though. He would like to run a theatre again one day, although "because it becomes your baby", he plans to start a family first. He lives in Islington with his partner, the playwright Laura Wade, and hopes to have children soon. Achieving one ambition leads to the next, it seems. In fact, his list has never been longer, but does he really mean it when he says he wants to be James Bond? "Everybody says they want to do Hamlet, and nobody ever jokes about wanting to be Bond. But it's the part everyone secretly wants to play. I would." With his experience of playing toffs, frauds and serial killers, he'd be perfect for the part.

'Enron' runs from Saturday to 29 August at Chichester Festival Theatre (01243 781 312, www.cft.org.uk)

Tips for aspiring actors by Sam West

Try to stay solvent so you don't have to do rubbish. You might be tempted to take the first well-paid part on TV, but it might prove to be more damaging than beneficial.

Try to be happy for your colleagues' success. Acting is a collaborative art. In rehearsals it is vital to work as a team.

Remember that the writers are the true stars. Actors take a lot of the credit, but the playwright and screenwriters are the true creative forces. Without them, we wouldn't be able to exist.

You may have an idea as to the parts you think you can play, but it's much more important to know what other people think you can play. If you get a chance to play a very different sort of part to one you would normally take, then do it.

My best teacher - Sam West

26 June, 2009

This actor was immersed in the sciences until E.M. Forster knocked him sideways

I never found anything to rebel against at Alleyn’s (an independent school in southeast London). It possibly was a shame, but it was quite an easy-going place. It had this culture where enthusiasm for things was cool, whether it was sport, drama, music or art. There was a great energy about the place.
There still is that energy. I went back for the opening of the new theatre earlier this year and what’s extraordinary is there are now twice as many buildings than when I left 25 years ago.
I did physics, maths and chemistry at A-level for a term-and-a-half and I planned to do physics and maths at university. Alleyn’s had a policy that everyone who wasn’t doing English at A-level had to do English for one or two lessons a week. I had Mike Walsh and he taught us Howard’s End.
Maybe I was ready for the book, or it was the way he taught it, or I wasn’t really getting on with chemistry, but I was knocked sideways by it. The pleasure of discovering E.M. Forster in your teens, the liberal humanism and incipient socialism, just got me.
The philosophy of Howard’s End, gentle English liberalism, was very much Mike’s politics. It is a fruitful moment for a pupil to realise that the book you are studying is not just something to be studied but something to learn from, something that can fill you and fuel you.
When a teacher is involved in a book, when it is part of them and they teach it not only because they like it but they think it is important, something comes across to a pupil that is not about exam questions. We were studying it because it was a book Mike thought we should read. I didn’t really know it at the time, but that is what good teaching is like. It changed my life. When I was in the film I knew much more about the sort of film I wanted to be in.
I also had advice from my chemistry teacher, who said my predicted grade was E. It was meant to make me work harder, but it made me think I was just pushing myself when I should have been doing something I loved, so I dropped chemistry and ended up doing physics, maths and English for A- level.
Mike believed in the importance of reading aloud, and that was something I was reasonably good at, although I was only in one play at school. I played Claudius in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but I wasn’t very good in it. It wasn’t until I got to university that I did more acting. I did 17 plays in three years, although some were quite short.
Mike had a gentle sense of authority but he didn’t spread praise liberally. He spent time if he thought things were good, but not if he thought it was simply correct or wrong. It’s not that there is no such thing as a wrong answer, because there is and it is helpful to know that.
His world view is slightly chaotic. I spoke to him last week and he said much as Dickens is a brilliant novelist, in Dickens’s world things go wrong because people behave badly, whereas in Hardy people behave how they want to behave and it is still awful. I don’t think that’s the way Mike wants it to be, but he thought it was the way things were.
He used to set us quizzes. He would ask who said what, and I remember once on the last day of term he asked who said: “I’m a man more sinned against than sinning”. I thought it might be King Lear so I said “Lear” and I remember his absolute expression of delight, not that I had known it but I had thought it seemed like the sort of thing Lear might say.
I think I remember it partly because I got the question right and partly because he was so pleased I guessed.
We lived quite close to each other and met up by chance after I left Alleyn’s and stayed in touch. We still meet up occasionally. We have long planned a dinner.
Sam West is an actor and director whose film and TV credits include ‘Howard’s End’, ‘Iris’ and ‘The Long Walk to Finchley’. He has played Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is artistic director of the Sheffield Theatres. He was talking to Nick Morrison.

TES - My Best Teacher

Review: Waste, Almeida Theatre

Friday, 14 November 2008

Review: Waste, Almeida Theatre

Waste, a play by Harley Granville Barker, is another one of those plays that was banned when first written, in this case in 1907. Directed by actor Samuel West at the Almeida theatre, this version uses the revised 1926 text to great effect with as strong an ensemble you will find in London this autumn.

The story follows Henry Trebell an independent MP with a lifelong dream of wanting to disestablish the Church of England and build colleges on the land and has formed part of a Tory push to get the bill passed as law with their anticipated arrival in government. However, his personal life is in disarray as a casual affair with a married woman who ends up pregnant comes to light and threatens to ruin everything that he holds dear.

The way in which the hypocrisy of the political classes is exposed means that much of this play, although set in the 20s, rings true today. The politicking and skullduggery that goes on as the politicians try to manage the fallout from the scandal and turn it as much their advantage as possible is fascinating and there’s a pleasure to be gained from eavesdropping on such a conversation that would never normally come to light. But the play also deals with private lives and the harrowing truths that hold Trebell and his spinster in their hollow emotional shells

As one has come to expect from the Almeida, the cast is sensational right down the list. Will Keen’s tragic Trebell conveys the real sense of ‘waste’ in a life that has consistently placed duty over emotion with a fiercely internalised performance; Phoebe Nicholl is sensational as the constantly forgiving yet equally emotionally repressed sister; Nancy Carroll’s performance as the discarded lover is stunning but frequently difficult to watch with the rawness of the emotion on display and Hugh Ross, Richard Cordery and Peter Eyre all provide wonderfully odious variations on a theme of smarmy politicians.

Yet despite how well-acted it was, it was hard to define how I actually felt about it for a long time. It is one of those occasions where I think I admired it more than loved it as it did prove hard-going. Clearly it is emotionally punishing, but I did find it physically tough as I just wanted it to get on with it at times. This was possibly because I wasn’t feeling 100% but I did feel that Granville Barker tries to cover too much in here and Sam West’s directing could have dealt with it: there were moments that could have been cut, dialogue tightened up and the same result achieved. That said it is very good, if a little bum-numbing and be prepared to work hard!