Past/Present/Future for … Finbar Lynch

PAST:
“Not About Nightingales was a unique experience. It was in effect a ‘new’ Tennessee Williams play, which Trevor Nunn directed in the Cottesloe. Williams wrote it just before The Glass Menagerie and it had never been done before. It was a new text by a young playwright, but it was very definitely Tennessee Williams, the voice was there, very clear. I suppose the character that I played, Canary Jim, was a typical Williams character in many ways: a guy in prison who dreams of being a poet, somebody with a hard exterior who has a very sensitive interior. Trevor is a great director for working on new texts – he probably cut about a fifth of it. And Richard Hoover, who designed it, had just done Dead Man Walking, so we had an amazing set.

But it was a difficult play to do. There was a lot of brutality. Some of the actors were literally chalking off each performance, like you’d chalk off days left in prison. It had that kind of feel to it, like doing time, because in the end we were doing it for quite a long time! We started at the National, then we took it to Houston for a couple of weeks and then we were on Broadway for a few months. Working in New York was just fantastic. It’s not like London. You have people living right in the city so you’re constantly bumping into people who’ve seen your show, and because it was a new Tennessee Williams, there was a real particular interest among the New York community. You got a lot of positive feedback all the time.

“That would definitely be a highlight. There are other parts that I have really enjoyed. I have done two Pinters in the past three years and I’ve really enjoyed both of them: The Hothouse last year at the National and The Birthday Party. I loved being on stage with Eileen Atkins in The Birthday Party. I think she is sublime. It’s interesting being around her in rehearsals, but being on stage with her was a different experience again.”

PRESENT: “Catherine McCormack and I play a married couple in two productions in the Peter Hall season. The first is The Portrait of a Lady, which is an adaptation of the (1881) Henry James novel. Catherine is Isabelle Archer, a young American lady who comes over to Europe to educate herself, to go out into the world and learn about art and culture, and she inherits some money which gives her the freedom to pursue that way of life. But then she meets my character, Gilbert Osmond, a collector who hasn’t got much money, and they get married, but really that is just the wrong marriage for her. She becomes trapped.

In A Doll’s House, in many ways it’s just a typical marriage. Torvald is a bank manager and Nora is a mother of three children. But they have this friend, Dr Rank, who comes to the house every day. He’s really coming to see Nora but their sort of myth is that he’s coming for Torvald, who is his oldest friend. You might think on the surface, ‘is this play dated, is it still relevant?’ But then you listen to the news, you know, about the Church of England voting on whether there should be women bishops. Why shouldn’t there be women bishops? If you think about it, it’s absolutely ludicrous that that’s the world we’re still living in. Okay, women have more opportunities and prospects in general, but in terms of our relationships with each other, I’m not sure that the fundamental dynamics have changed that much since A Doll’s House was written (in 1879).

“I liked the idea of playing the two roles in rep, but I have done that a lot before with the RSC. What really attracted me to this season was the opportunity to work with Peter Hall because I had never worked with him before and there is no substitute for experience in my opinion. He has just got such a fantastic wealth of experience, and we can draw on that as actors without any question.”

FUTURE: “After Bath, we take The Portrait of a Lady to Cambridge and Malvern and then we take both plays to the Rose Theatre in Kingston. After that, I’m going to do Peter’s next production at the Rose, Love’s Labour’s Lost. I’m playing Berowne. Having worked on these two productions with Peter, it will be really fun to do some Shakespeare with him. I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare, but working with Peter is going to be really special, I think, because he is the master. What he was involved in with the RSC was really developing a particular coherent and cohesive system of speaking the language. The whole company had a way of verse-speaking then, which is not the case now. Now it’s very different production to production – and sometimes even within the same production it varies.

It’s going to be interesting to work with someone who has got a very definite idea about how the verse should be spoken. I have a very definite idea about that myself – I hope it’s the same as Peter’s! I think you have to observe the rules, and if you observe the rules, it sort of makes sense. I remember at the RSC we used to say it was like playing jazz: you have to be able to play music before you can then play jazz, but if you learn the rules, which are pretty simple, you can then play around with it a bit. The whole point, the key thing, is that it is possible to make it sound like it’s ordinary speech in a way. Mark Rylance does that. I saw Alan Rickman play Hamlet at the Riverside Studios and he was doing that. That kind of actor makes you feel like they really are saying it for the first time. That’s what I aspire to.”

– Finbar Lynch was speaking to Terri Paddock

The Portrait of a Lady and A Doll’s House open on 23 July 2008 (previews from 3 & 8 July) at the Theatre Royal Bath, where they continue in rep until 9 August. The Portrait of a Lady then visits Cambridge (11-16 August) and Malvern (18-23 August), before transferring with A Doll’s House to the Rose Theatre, Kingston, where they run, again in rep, from 26 August to 27 September. Love’s Labour’s Lost is at the Rose Theatre from 21 October to 15 November 2008.