The Stage

Roger Rees: The wait is over

Published Friday 29 January 2010 at 15:25 by Nick Smurthwaite

After an absence of more than a quarter of a century, Roger Rees is returning to the London stage opposite Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot. He talks to Nick Smurthwaite about life in the US, how his painting career is still on hold and why he’s intent on bringing Shakespeare to the masses

Considering it is 26 years since Roger Rees last set foot on a London stage, he seems surprisingly nonchalant about his comeback as Ian McKellen’s fellow tramp in the already acclaimed Waiting for Godot.

“I’ve been trying to come back in a play since I went to America in the eighties,” says Rees, who made his name on both sides of the Atlantic playing an impossibly handsome and charismatic Nicholas Nickleby in the iconic 1980 RSC production.

Given the febrile actor’s reputation for versatility and hard work, the honest response to that is: “You weren’t trying to hard enough,” but as Rees points out, he hasn’t exactly been sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. Since being granted American citizenship in 1989, he has run a leading theatre festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts, appeared several times on Broadway, been in TV shows such as Cheers and The West Wing, toured his own one-man show about playing Shakespeare and made umpteen movies.

The youthful Nickleby looks may have been overtaken by the ravages of time, but the actor still has a full head of dark, though greying, hair and is admirably slim for his 65 years. “If you live in the States you have to join a gym,” he confides with characteristic economy.

His return to the London stage alongside his old friend and contemporary McKellen will inevitably spark memories of his long apprenticeship in the British theatre.

Acting was not his first choice of career. A quiet, antisocial child, he dreamed of becoming a fine artist and was three years into achieving that goal at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, when fate took a turn. His father died suddenly and he felt he had to quit the Slade in order to support his mother and younger brother. He did menial jobs such as washing Venetian blinds at Simpson’s of Piccadilly, before being taken on by Wimbledon Theatre as a scenery painter.

The then actor-manager at Wimbledon, Arthur Lane, needed a lad to appear in Murder in the Vicarage and asked the angelic-looking Rees if he was interested. One thing led to another and Rees was soon doing panto with variety legends such as Arthur Askey and Roy Castle.

“Doing sketches with people like Arthur and Roy gave me a deep respect for variety people,” says Rees, now a proud member of the Grand Order of Water Rats. “I learnt so much from watching them work. I’ve often thought I’m a short music hall comedian stuck in a leading man’s body. It is one of the reasons I jumped at playing Vladimir, because it has the potential to be funny and moving at the same time, which is the best kind of theatre.”

While he was at Wimbledon, smitten by acting yet completely untrained, Rees naively auditioned for the RSC, only to be told he didn’t have the right sort of voice for classical theatre. So he applied for a job as stage manager/prop-maker at the Pitlochry Festival.

“One of the actors at Pitlochry had an ear infection, so I was drafted in to play Yasha in The Cherry Orchard, Bruno in Dear Charles, lots of small parts, which gave me some confidence and authority. Later, I re-auditioned for the RSC and got in. I joined at the same time as Ben Kingsley and about a year after, Trevor Nunn took over as artistic director.”

He remained with the RSC for a staggering 22 years, spending his first four years doing walk-ons and “moving scenery around”. Eventually he and Kingsley started to get minor speaking parts, building up to juvenile roles in the late sixties in The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar and As You Like It. As well as moving up the RSC’s role call, Rees was also given the opportunity to see the world in touring productions.

The debt he still feels to the RSC and to Shakespeare in particular is reflected in What You Will, the celebratory one-man show he has been touring for the past four years. He describes it as an evening in which he strives to convince his audience that Shakespeare belongs to everyone.

“I try to reassure them that he was a human being who, if he were around today, would be wearing Levis and writing for television. A lot of it is about my journey as a fairly uneducated kid from Wales becoming someone who can act and talk about Shakespeare, and think about the value of language.

“I do a soliloquy from Hamlet, I play the nurse in Romeo and Juliet with a country accent, I do Richard II, I play the ukulele, I have a ball. I’ve just finished touring it through the Midwest, playing places like Wichita and Kansas City. They loved it.”

According to The Washington Post: “He conveys each of these characters with the combination of technique and magnetism that has distinguished RSC actors of his generation. The quality of Rees’ Shakespeare is his most exciting argument for continuing enjoyment of the canon.”

Bringing the show to the UK is high on Rees’ list of priorities for 2010, along with directing a prequel to Peter Pan entitled Peter and the Starcatchers in New York.

Having started out with dreams of becoming an artist, is he ever tempted to pick up a paint brush? “I was really serious about painting, so I could never be a Sunday painter,” he says. “You can’t just switch it on and off. I have a little studio in Chinatown and I sometimes go there and rearrange my brushes. But I would have to stop acting altogether in order to become a painter. At the moment I’m still interested and active as an actor and director. Besides, I rather think acting and painting are all part of the same creative urge.”

Waiting for Godot is running at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London until April 3