Unusual suspects - Kevin Spacey and the Old Vic

Published Monday 22 May 2006 at 10:35 by Alistair Smith

Kevin Spacey tells how he is answering his critics with what he insists is a risky new season at the Old Vic, writes Alistair Smith

If Kevin Spacey is feeling under pressure, he is doing a very good job of hiding the fact. Over the last month or so, he and his regime at the Old Vic Theatre have received the kind of press mauling usually reserved for politicians. Critics savaged the undeniable flop that was Resurrection Blues and then, after its premature removal from the Waterloo venue’s stage, it was revealed that there was nothing planned to take its place until September. The Old Vic’s famous auditorium was dark and the critics were baying for blood. Spacey’s blood.

Yet, when I meet him the day after he has announced his new season, Spacey is the picture of relaxation. As I am ushered into his office, he is poised, feet crossed and resting on his desk, cigarette in hand, a disarming smile spread across his distinctive features.

One thing he is not trying to disguise, however, is his obvious frustration at some of the criticism and “inaccurate reporting” that has been levelled at both him and his beloved theatre.

“I think to some degree part of the criticism we have come under is that I don’t think people have an idea of what our artistic ambitions are,” he explains, perhaps optimistically. “Sometimes I don’t think people realise what it takes to organise a schedule - it’s not easy.”

To counteract this perceived problem, Spacey has taken the opportunity to announce not only his plans for next season - A Moon for the Misbegotten, starring himself, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night directed by Ed Hall, and The Entertainer with Robert Lindsay as Archie Rice - but also a few of his plans for the future.

These include a second collaboration with director Trevor Nunn, following last season’s Richard II, the first major London staging of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests trilogy since the seventies, a pantomime scripted by Stephen Fry and two new plays that are both products of the Old Vic New Voices development programme.

This is not, he insists, a safe, banker of a season. “I don’t think taking on the Norman Conquests is not a risk. It’s three different plays, which means it’s expensive. There are risks, certainly the two new plays are risks. So we’re not playing it safe but we are going along exactly as we had intended to go along. For example, I have known for three years that we were going to do The Entertainer right when we are doing it.”

And yet, despite apparently giving the people, or critics, what they want, it seems he still can’t keep everyone happy. Spacey himself is only performing in one production and not directing any. “It was always my intention to start to do less work [onstage]. Because, first of all, the novelty of my appearing on stage will eventually wear off and second of all, this theatre company cannot survive and live if the entire weight of its success is on my shoulders,” he explains.

“People will argue, ‘Oh, well, the theatre company only works because he was onstage’, but when I announce a huge amount of work with other people onstage, they complain that I am thinning out my role. They keep changing the goalposts.”

Another notable feature of his recent season announcement is the addition of three artistic associates to the Old Vic team - Matthew Warchus, most famous for his work directing West End hit Art, Ed Hall, director of the all-male Propeller company and son of Peter, and Anthony Page, former artistic director of the Royal Court and director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Kathleen Turner. This is not, he explains a call for help or a reaction to criticism.

“I’ve seen things written saying, ‘Oh, they’re now reacting to what we’ve said’,” continues Spacey. “The truth is this has always been our intention but things have to happen naturally. You can’t just wave a magic wand and have subsidy money come down from the sky and have a group of associates.

“When I began, David [Liddiment, the Old Vic producer] and I to some degree were outsiders. We knew that. As we’ve been going along we’ve been developing relationships. I don’t know that anyone would have wanted to come on and be an associate in our first season - they didn’t know what we were, didn’t know what we were about. Now people do and I hope that yesterday’s announcement is a fairly clear indication that the theatre community is supporting us and some incredible talents believe in what we are trying to do and want to come and be a part of that.”

In fact, according to Spacey, despite two box office failures - Cloaca and Resurrection Blues - and an elongated dark period this summer, everything is pretty much going to plan.

“I took a long hard look at what had happened in this theatre before we started and I decided not to begin with the classics, which seems what the critics have been harping on [about], almost, ‘How can you put anything else on that stage?’. It’s [perhaps] a desire for [Laurence] Olivier to come back, which unfortunately for everyone is impossible.

“You have to look at the practicalities of running a commercial theatre and I don’t think I was wrong in assuming that if we had started with Ibsen, Shakespeare, Shaw and Chekhov that we would have appealed to a very narrow audience.”

Another misunderstanding Spacey is fighting hard to dispel is that the Old Vic is the recipient of lashings of public money. It isn’t. The company relies on box office receipts and sponsorship - hence its decision to remove Resurrection Blues early. The show was losing money and the theatre took a commercial decision to close it.

“I think it’s a widespread misconception and I think it’s probably a hold-over from when the National was here that people just identify us as a subsidised theatre. [Equally] we are not a one-off West End theatre house, we are a producing company that does a season of work and when you know that it does in fact change the way that you think about things. We’re not just rolling the dice and hoping that one of our shows makes money, we’re about developing something here that we want to last until well after we’re gone.”

Nor, he is equally keen to stress, is the Old Vic chief executive Sally Greene’s plaything. “I love it how sometimes I read in the paper that Sally Greene owns the Old Vic Theatre,” he continues. “She doesn’t own the Old Vic Theatre, she is the chairman of a trust. It is owned by a charitable trust. And what’s wrong with that is that it leaves the impression that the theatre is her toy and it’s not.”

And yet, one can understand how the misunderstanding arises, certainly over the idea that the Old Vic might be the recipient of government cash. After all, in many ways, it behaves like a subsidised theatre with education, outreach and new writing programmes functioning alongside a cut-price ticket scheme for under 25s. However, the Old Vic’s engagement in “social enterprise”, as Spacey terms it, is often overlooked.

“Some of my favourite days are the workshop days when there are around 1,000 kids running around, charging through the place and developing and learning how to collaborate. I just believe in it because I was a beneficiary of it when I was a kid.

“I went to school in Southern California when there was an enormous amount of government money given to the schools for culture and the arts. I was running round doing workshops with professional actors. I met Jack Lemmon when I was 13 years old. The confidence that this gives a person - I just know that you can have a lot to do with a kid’s self-confidence, with their character building.

“If they get to a place where they are put onstage and put in front of their peers and their teachers and their parents and maybe even the public, it is an experience they will never forget. It’s not about whether they want to go into the arts. It’s about using the tools of theatre and the artists of theatre to teach them how to collaborate with each other.

“The truth is that people can do really remarkable things when they start to think they can accomplish stuff and when they discover that, as far as I’m concerned, they’ve discovered the first secret of success… It’s not that I have great pearls of wisdom but we do have a great education programme.”

Spacey talks with huge fondness of Jack Lemmon, whom he later starred alongside onstage in Long Day’s Journey into Night and on film in Glengarry Glen Ross, and it is clear he is keen to pass on his love of theatre to a younger generation.

“It’s incredible how if somebody takes an interest in you, if somebody says, ‘I think you can do something’, and believes in you way before you’ve even shown any potential, then it just has a hugely far-reaching effect on the rest of your life,” he explains.

His own ambitions of working in theatre have certainly been long held. “The dream of running a theatre for me started when I was 13,” he continues. “I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and my best friend lived on a ranch that was built by Roy Rogers, the old cowboy star. We dreamed of building a theatre there. We were going to do Shakespeare and new plays and we were going to broaden the world, challenge ourselves. I still have the napkins where we drew up the designs of the amphitheatre.

“I was a kid in junior high school and high school doing theatre. I was directing a one-act play in the speech club, doing a monologue for the Shakespeare festival, playing a leading role in one of the school plays, doing the radio show in the morning. I was multi-tasking even then.”

After high school and a short spell as a comic, Spacey trained at Juilliard in New York but quit before the end of his course and joined the New York Shakespeare Festival. A successful stage career in New York followed, culminating in a 1991 Tony Award for his performance in Lost in Yonkers. Meanwhile his screen work was also taking off. It was in the mid to late nineties that he really began to come to the world’s attention with a series of film successes and a pair of Oscars for The Usual Suspects and later American Beauty.

Then, at the height of his Hollywood fame, the actor decided he might like to try his hand as an artistic director. “I didn’t really like the hot spotlight of it all and I really missed theatre,” he explains. “I missed it as a consistent part of my life. Theatre was never a stepping stone to movies for me, it is as important and viable form of expression as movies are.

“The process of making movies, while fun, is not particularly hard work and the truth is you’re lucky on an entire 12 or 13-hour day if you end up with eight minutes of film, so it’s just a slogging, different process. The other truth of it is you are guessing a lot. You hope you’ve got a good director but the truth is you don’t have five or six weeks of experimentation and that’s what the process of doing a play is like.

“You get to come in every day and experiment and then you get a chance to get up every night and work on a different part of your game. I just happen to love the thrill of that - the high-wire act of it and the ritual of it. I love the ritual of coming into the theatre every night and working with the same people, creating a family, because everyone’s up for it.”

The difference for him now, he adds, is that he is fitting his film work around his time on stage, rather than the other way round. So, while he will soon be on screen as Lex Luthor in Superman Returns, his screen work has had to adapt around his day job at the Old Vic.

“I’m happier than I’ve ever been, I’ve a very normal life. I don’t feel that I’m in a place where there’s all this pressure about whether your movie is doing well and is it getting good reviews. I’m here trying to build something that is bigger than me and I want to have last long, long, long after I’m gone.”

Now moving into his third season at the Old Vic, Spacey is less than a third into what will be a ten-year stay and, he assures me, absolutely no longer. The Vic will need “new blood” by then, he points out - and there is still much to be done.

To start with, there is a £25 million refurbishment to overhaul the venue, without which “there is no telling if the building will survive 50 years from now, because the damp will kill it” and the small question of returning repertory and ensemble theatre to the Vic, both of which are long-term visions for the team.

“We’re slightly starting [repertory] with Ed Hall with Twelfth Night and Taming of the Shrew and there’s no doubt that when Norman Conquests happens that’s exactly what we’ll do. It’s three plays, we’ll put up one at a time and then run them in rep, which is how they did it originally.”

A resident company might take a little longer though, although Spacey is hopeful of having something in place around the halfway mark of his tenure. “I think a company happens organically, so maybe after season four or five we’ll know who our company is,” he says. “We’ll know the actors who had an incredible time and want to come back. And then you sit down with four or five directors and you say, now I want to cross-cast a season with this company and do some rep.”

Spacey still has ambitions of his own of course, as an actor. Richard II was only his first leading Shakespearean role and there are still some big parts out there he is looking to wrestle with. “Iago, Richard III. I’d love to do some Shaw, I’d love to do some Ibsen and Moliere. There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to tackle but at the same time I have to be quite smart about the parts I take and the parts I want other actors to take.”

He is also keen to introduce more international work to the Old Vic and extend the company’s reach beyond the boundaries of its historical home near Waterloo.

“What interests me is not just being able to develop the work here on the South Bank and having that theatre filled but also to be able to start to do some of the new work that we’ll see but think it’s not right for the Vic, let’s take it to the Criterion. Let’s present Old Vic work in other places. We don’t have the luxury of three or more theatres - we have one space and we to run our shows a certain length in order to be able to recoup.

“In some cases, we’re looking at other spaces where we might well want to take something, so that we can have a show running here but we can also have a show running somewhere else.”

Speaking of running somewhere else, our time is up and Spacey has to leave. He swings his feet off the table, puts out his umpteenth cigarette and reaches for his baseball cap. He is off to his next appointment - multi-tasking, as ever.