Jonathan Pryce takes on Shylock: ‘I’d love it if they booed me’
|
Version 0 of 1. “People sometimes ask me why I did this or that project,” says Jonathan Pryce halfway through our interview. He turns to me with a blissful smile, his face a picture of innocence, and adds: “I say, well, they asked me.” We’re talking about his film work, but if you were searching for the rationale behind Pryce’s career, it’s not a bad place to start. How else to make sense of it? He must be the only person in history to have acted alongside Martine McCutcheon (in the West End, albeit intermittently) and River Phoenix. He’s been both Lytton Strachey (on film), Cardinal Wolsey (for the BBC’s Wolf Hall) and Gustav Mahler (long ago, not terribly successfully). Musicals? Check. Mamet? Check. Game of Thrones? He’s your man. Chameleonic doesn’t do him justice. Say what you like about the choices he has made (GI Joe – twice), but Pryce has a vaudevillian’s talent for the unexpected. For his latest piece of shape-shifting, he’s back in theatre. At the age of 67, this is another first: his debut at Shakespeare’s Globe, playing a much-anticipated Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. We meet backstage, before an afternoon of rehearsals. He’s dapperly dressed, scarf knotted just so, beard silvering elegantly, but the lines under his eyes look sharply etched. The role, he admits, is getting to him. “I don’t worry normally, but with this one…” He brushes an imaginary piece of lint off his trouser leg. “I haven’t worried about anything so much for years. I hate that phrase ‘comfort zone’, but Shylock is definitely way out of mine. When I played Lear [at the Almeida in 2012], I felt I knew him – knew the man, understood that descent into madness. Lear gets a chance to express himself. With Shylock, you just don’t: so much of him is in shadow.” The role of the Jewish moneylender who demands his piece of flesh is famously ambiguous. For much of the play’s life on stage, Shylock was the villain of the piece. Only since the 19th century, and far more so since the Holocaust, have actors explored more sympathetic portrayals: a Shylock more sinned against than sinning, an outcast driven to revenge by the anti-semitism that surrounds him. Anyone expecting a reprise of Pryce’s leering turn as Fagin in the West End in 1994 will be disappointed, he says. “Shylock tries to get his revenge, sure, but Antonio and the Christians, I think they’re monsters – these Bullingdon Club types who’ve persecuted him for years, spat on him, kicked him. And suddenly they need him. It’s remarkable, actually, the play’s language: it’s totally contemporary.” He gives the beard a ruminative rasp. “But I’ll tell you, Lear was easier.” I worked for Mel Brooks and he thought I was Jewish. If I was Jewish enough for Mel Brooks… He seems to be making a speciality of Jewish roles recently: in the summer we’ll see him in Listen Up Philip, a film in which he plays a drily cynical east coast American writer, alongside Jason Schwartzman and Elisabeth Moss. In theory, this is a fictional character loosely based on Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, but hardly a million miles from Roth himself. “The director had doubts because I wasn’t Jewish. I said, ‘I worked for Mel Brooks and Mel Brooks thought I was Jewish. If I was Jewish enough for Mel Brooks, then that’s got to be good enough for you.’” As a boy growing up in north Wales, Pryce had no desire to be an actor, barely knew how that might work. In thrall to the Beatles and the blues, his earliest ambition was to be a pop star (“that could account for the musicals”). It was only after doing teacher-training that a tutor encouraged him to apply for Rada. His first jobs in the early 1970s were at Liverpool’s Everyman. “Talk about versatility: they call it ‘play as cast’. You played whatever you were given. One time I had to do Edgar in King Lear and Owl in Winnie the Pooh on the same day.” It was Trevor Griffiths’s 1975 play Comedians, in which he played an unsettlingly charismatic trainee standup, that brought Pryce to national and then, courtesy of a Broadway transfer, international attention. But it was Hamlet at London’s Royal Court in 1980 – in which Pryce played a prince literally possessed, Exorcist-style, by his father’s spirit – that affirmed his explosive reputation. It won him the first of two Olivier awards, to add to the Tony he’d acquired for Comedians. Richard Eyre, who directed both productions, called him “the most dangerous theatre actor around”. As anyone who saw his Lear can testify, Pryce has lost little of his prowling menace, despite his refreshingly un-method approach to his craft. “I don’t think about it too much, or analyse why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’ve never had therapy. Maybe the work is the therapy.” So he doesn’t buy the theory that actors are forever wrestling with buried psychological demons? “Maybe as a younger man. It was the roles I was playing, partly, and I was very angry about all sorts of things, that’s true. But I was able to put it into the work.” More recently, he has received plaudits for his watchful turn as Wolsey in Wolf Hall, acclaimed as one of the best BBC dramas in years. “I was a bit worried that it was slower and more thoughtful than you’d normally see, but it didn’t underestimate the audience’s intelligence. It’s odd – when people come up to you and say nice things, normally you just say thanks very much. This is the first time I’ve found myself saying, ‘Yes, isn’t it totally fantastic?’” Wolf Hall also provided an unexpected bonus: having filmed alongside Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, he was able to secure an insider’s masterclass on performing at the Globe. “He walked me around, telling me the best place to stand, useful stuff like that. The great thing is the audience: you’ve got 700 people standing at your feet, everyone in the light together. It’s almost like having another cast member.” Anxieties about the role notwithstanding, you sense he’s relishing the opportunity to be at the Globe: a touch of the Everyman days, perhaps. And it offers something else that’s new: the opportunity to act with his daughter Phoebe. In a neat metadramatic doubling, she will play Shylock’s daughter Jessica – not as nepotistic as it sounds, he hastens to add. “They approached her separately, they’d seen her at Rada, and asked her before they asked me.” Has it been strange, rehearsing with his own flesh and blood? “Well, I’ve worked with my partner before, so it’s not totally new. But yeah, it was slightly strange the first time I spoke to her as a character, but the more we go on the less odd it will get.” He looks deadpan. “Of course, in the play Jessica takes all my money. That’s daughters for you.” Age is catching up with Pryce: he recently had a knee replacement and he put his back out playing Lear. “I fell when I was doing a show at the Donmar – and years of playing raked stages hasn’t helped.” He mimes wobbling on stage with a crutch, disconcertingly Fagin-like. “It might get the sympathy vote, I suppose.” Nonetheless he’s bustling with plans: in particular, there’s The Wife, a new film with Glenn Close based on Meg Wolitzer’s novel about a philandering New York novelist (yet another) who is abandoned by his partner. Shooting begins late this year. He’s also been toying for years with the idea of playing the one major Shakespeare role that has still eluded him: Prospero in The Tempest. In characteristically idiosyncratic fashion, he’s considering going to do it with the Icelandic company Vesturport. “Everyone else would be speaking Icelandic, I’d be speaking English.” He looks surprised that I’m surprised. “Almost everyone in Iceland speaks English.” Our time is nearly up. I mention that previous Shylocks at the Globe have borne the brunt of the audience’s displeasure: at least one was booed. Is he worried the same might happen to him? The smile reappears, this time entirely wolfish. “Oh, I’d love it if they booed me. I’d find that fascinating.” • The Merchant of Venice is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, from 23 April–7 June. Box office: 020-7401 9919 |