Roger Allam has never been to Germany
and doesn't speak a word of
German. But, as the dynamic, flawed Willy Brandt in
Michael Frayn's
multi-award-winning Democracy, he shows
yet again that he's one
of British theatre's classiest acts.
Matt Wolf meets him
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| IT'S NOT EASY TO MAKE A SEXY EVENING
of theatre out of ten men in suits, but that's
just one of the many accomplishments of Michael
Frayn's latest play, Democracy, which
has arrived at Wyndham's Theatre in the West
End after two successive sell-out National
Theatre runs. The complex play's trajectory
comes as a surprise to its leading man, Roger
Allam, who - as he recalls, laughing - thought:
'I don't know; I don't get this, really,'
when he first read the script. |
| But Allam's success as the one-time
German Chancellor Willy Brandt in Michael
Blakemore's production should come to theatre
lovers as no surprise at all. Recently turned
50, Allam has quietly but consistently carved
out a niche for himself across two Olivier
Awards, 11 years at the RSC, and a sequence
of superb work for the National as exactly
the sort of stalwart performer on whom the
British theatre thrives. After all, if it's
one of the points of Frayn's play that we
all carry within us various warring democracies
over which we rule at our peril, how lucky
we are over time to have witnessed the various
guises of Roger Allam. We've seen him in musicals,
Shakespeare and Chekhov, to cite just a thin
wedge of his work in the classics, as well
as going on to new plays, at the head of which
is surely this provocative slab of semi-fictionalised
history from Frayn. |
| 'I'm amazed at the way Democracy
has sort of caught the public imagination,'
says Allam, reflecting upon the play's onward
journey into the West End. Initially, Allam
admits responding to the script 'in that typical
selfish actor's way - that Willy had an awful
lot of listening to do and did a lot of standing
around while the others got to speak'. Allam
says he was 'on the verge of turning the play
down' when he took advantage of a long weekend
to read the script aloud with his partner,
the actress Rebecca Saire. (The couple have
a four-year-old son, William.) And, as the
two performers animated the text, Frayn's
subtle handling of the shifting sands of devotion
and betrayal began to come firmly into view,
alongside an awareness in Allam that he was
clearly destined in his career for, he chuckles,
'a German phase' - even though the actor,
born in Bromley-by-Bow in the East End, speaks
not one word of German and has never been
to Germany. |
| It was during Trevor Nunn's regime
at the National, after all, that Allam scored
several of his greatest triumphs. Those begin
with his performance as Hitler in David Edgar's
Albert Speer, adapted from Gitta Sereny's
biography of the architect, in which he re-imagined
for keeps one of the most chronicled people
of the 20th century. 'That was an easier task,
in a way,' says Allam, comparing the challenges
of acting Hitler with his current gig as Brandt,
that ideological architect of Ostpolitik,
the policy for healing the breach between
East and West which won him the 1971 Nobel
peace prize. 'It sounds trivial to say it,'
says Allam, who in conversation emerges as
anything but, 'and yet, there was just a lot
more showbiz [playing] Hitler. And, because
the play was called after Speer, not Hitler,
I was always playing Speer's version, his
experience of Hitler. That probably made my
task a bit easier.' |
| Allam thinks back to various crucial
moments in the similar extraordinary rise
and fall of the politician whom he is now
playing eight times a week. 'I remember Willy
becoming Chancellor in 1969, and I remember
my parents thinking he was a good thing. I
remember him kneeling at the memorial to the
Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, of course, and
I remember him resigning and looking disappointed
or sad.' |
| Are Allam and Brandt a natural
physical fit? 'Willy was burlier than I am,
stockier, until he was very old and got much
thinner' says Allam, who at six feet tall
is no physical slouch himself. 'His brow seemed
to be furrowed with thought, and when he smiled,
his face was a glory of wrinkles, so my job
in the play was about finding a kind of expression,
really, and a tone of voice, rather than an
accent.' |
| It helps, of course, that Frayn's
play never pretends to be a documentary. Instead,
Democracy tells of the deep yet deceptive
rapport between Brandt and his East German
personal assistant, Günter Guillaume,
who doubled as a Stasi spy: an aide-de-camp
who clearly adored the very same boss whose
secrets he was passing to the other side.
(The Irish actor Conleth Hill, from the original
cast of Stones in his Pockets, makes
a funny and heartfelt Guillaume.) |
| Frayn's play, says Allam, 'gets
you as a love story, but we're also lucky
that the story of political machinations has
been in the papers all this past year while
we've been doing the play; it's never ever
gone away.' Here in the UK, the actor points
out, 'we have a left-of-centre government
grappling with the realities of office: there
are lots of connections there that have helped
us, I think, and made people respond to the
play in a way that perhaps in another era
they wouldn't have.' At the same time, Brandt's
sexual energy, at least as addressed by Frayn,
has echoes across the Atlantic of the misdeeds
of Bill Clinton. Do such escapades tally with
Allam's own life? 'I've never had that level
of adulation.' He gives a low, strong laugh.
'Though there were one or two odd occurrences,
of course...' |
| An odd occurrence, aesthetically
speaking, was surely Allam's last West End
foray, late in 2002. In American writer Michael
Weller's dim two-hander, What the Night
Is For, Allam played the former and possibly
future lover of none other than former X
Files star Gillian Anderson, who was making
her London stage debut. The play required
Allam to shed his clothes, but far more revealing
were the poor reviews. Allam, quite properly,
is unrepentant about the experience. 'It was
nice to do something that had no other agenda
and that was what it was, really. What
the Night Is For was very, very different
from a Michael Frayn play. There weren't a
lot of strange interconnecting levels on which
the play was working; it worked as the story
that it was.' |
| It helped that audiences came
in sufficient numbers to keep the play at
the Comedy Theatre for more than three months,
during which time Allam was delighted to find
himself 'adopted' by a particular cadre of
Anderson fans: 'There was a small group of
Spaniards, 20 Spanish girls, going, "Raw-heer,
Raw-heer"' - he affectionately imitates
the broad Spanish pronunciation of 'Roger'
- 'and I thought they were charming - lovely,
actually.' And so he wasn't overly surprised
last autumn to find the same claque in attendance
at a performance of Democracy. 'They'd
managed to get tickets' says Allam, sounding
vaguely bemused by all the attention. "They're
very tenacious.' |
| The glare of the West End, in
truth, is relatively new to Allam, notwithstanding
his stint in the mid-Eighties as Javert in
the original Palace Theatre (and, before that,
at the Barbican) company of Les Misérables
and a subsequent, if short-lived, stand as
the Bogart-like private eye in the award-winning
financial flop, City oj Angels, the
Cy Coleman musical that transferred to rave
reviews to the Prince of Wales from Broadway.
'In a way, if one can talk about oneself like
this, I think I'm seen as versatile' says
Allam of his breadth of work, which includes
an Olivier Award-winning turn at the Donmar
Warehouse in Peter Nichols' play-with-music
Privates on Parade as the camp cross-dressing
Terri Dennis. ('Ooh, that Bernadette Shaw
- what a chatterbox!') When the director Michael
Grandage first mentioned Privates on Parade,
Allam thought he would be up for the show's
other, considerably more strait-laced leading
military role, originated by Nigel Hawthorne.
'But Terri, because it seemed more unlikely
to me, was instantly more appealing; that's
always been part of the appeal of acting for
me.' |
| What of the allure of acting in
Allam's own life? A vicar's son, he refers
to the theatre as 'a lifeline to me, really:
a kind of education'. As a boarder at Christ's
Hospital school in Sussex, he played Guildenstern
in Hamlet and went on his own to the
theatre for the first time in the early 1970s
to see Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
are Dead at the Olivier-era Old Vic. 'The
fact that I was studying Hamlet meant that
I understood the play easily, so I felt ushered
into a kind of strange mixture of a private
world for me but also a public world shared
with this large crowd of strangers that was
the audience.' For 15 pence, he got to sit
on 'little padded benches in the gallery,'
and that was the price of his Tube fare, too. |
| It costs considerably more, of
course, these days for Allam to commute up
to town daily from Mortlake in south-west
London, where he and Saire moved last year
('It's nice to be near the park or the river')
after Allam's quarter-century in and around
Stoke Newington, in the north-east of the
capital. (Allam says that 'better schools,
alas, than in Hackney' played a part in the
family's decision to go west.) |
| Hollywood and the LA scene, he
says, were never an option: 'I wouldn't have
known what to do.' Nonetheless, and having
reached the half-century mark where, Allam
quips, 'a noise accompanies almost every physical
activity', he would now like to do more film.
'I've done a bit; I've not done much I'm pleased
with overall, but I've done some stuff I'm
not ashamed of' starting with his recent turn
as a playwright modelled on Tennessee Williams
in a TV remake of The Roman Spring of Mrs
Stone, starring Helen Mirren and Anne
Bancroft. But age, he smiles, has brought
with it a greater calm about the vagaries
of life as an actor. 'I've reached a stage
- I hope it lasts - where I try not to worry
as much as I might have done when I was younger;
I've got to what Tony Sher calls the "oh-fuck-it
stage", where you kind of think, oh well,
I'll just see.' |
| In any case, there are still more
Germans left for Allam to play. After all,
he notes, deadpan, there's always Adenauer,
the Musical. The actor pauses, as if to
retract the suggestion. 'Don't! Don't!' Allam
shrieks in mock-alarm. 'Someone will do it.' |
| Matt Wolf
is the London theatre critic for Variety and
the International Herald Tribune. |
| TheatreGoer |
April 2004 |
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