End of August 2009
When I came off on the last night, we were all going to have a celebratory drink in the dressing room, and I couldn't. I went into a side room and just started crying. Sky TV was following the production in the Haymarket, and Sean [Mathias], the director, came in with the company manager. They'd got microphones on, because they were part of this filming, and so, although the camera wasn't in there, you could hear this sobbing. It had been an absolutely joyous job.
When we'd suggested doing it, the Theatre Royal management had said, "Nobody wants to see Waiting for Godot." As it happened, every single ticket was booked for every single performance, and this confirmation that our judgment was right was sweet. Audiences came to us from all over the world. It was amazing.
We would meet them afterwards at the stage door. My first question was always, "Where have you come from?" Someone would say, "I've come from Galway." Someone else would say, "I've come from Sweden." And someone would say, "I've come from Perth." I'd say, "That's not very far." "No, Australia." So it had been a real popular success, and I thought: this is what I always wanted to do in the theatre. So the thought that it was going to end was upsetting in a way that I've never really felt before.
Then the Haymarket realised that when Breakfast at Tiffany's came off, there was no reason why we shouldn't revive the production. Almost immediately, we were looking at the possibilities, at the dates. I had a commitment to film The Hobbit in New Zealand in March, then that got pushed to June, so then I was suddenly free. Patrick [Stewart, playing Vladimir, aka Didi] wasn't free.
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End of October
Roger Rees was confirmed in the part of Vladimir. I did ask Patrick if he was all right about it. He sent an email, saying that if anyone was to replace him, he would have chosen Roger, and there was absolutely no ill feeling at all, and he was going to creep in quietly and see the show.
The partnership between Magneto and Professor X, the parts Patrick and I played in the X-Men movies, meant that, for the audience, we were already, in some sense, a partnership, and it wasn't odd for people to see us together on stage. Roger's career and mine don't have quite those similarities. I've not seen him work in 20 years. I saw him in Cheers. But I have much more history with Roger than with Patrick, actually. We did seven plays together in a short period of time, 30 years ago. The big partnership was when he played Andrew Aguecheek and I played Toby Belch in Twelfth Night. It'll be rather reversed in this play, because the dominant character in that Twelfth Night partnership is Belch. In Godot, Didi, Roger's character, is the provider, the guardian, the one who is trying to work out the plan.
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Before Christmas
The obvious fact of the play is that it's about four old people. I don't have to pretend to be 70. I am. Astonishingly, Roger is 65. He seems to be galloping towards 25 to me. He is always cracking jokes. He's one of the wittiest men I know. He's very outgoing, instantly friendly with strangers; but even when you know him quite well, there are all sorts of things that you don't know. Roger has depths you don't necessarily see.
He is now an American citizen, and he's constantly oohing and aahing about the changes in London. But it just does feel as though we're right back 30 years ago. He sprang into the rehearsal room. He and Sean Mathias and I have a week together. What you can't do under these circumstances is keep saying to Roger, "Oh, this is what Patrick did at this point." It's insulting to both. And the difficulty was always going to be allowing Roger's performance to mature in stages and letting him go down alleys we probably knew were going to be culs-de-sac, just so he could realise for himself that it was better to do something else. Also, we must be absolutely open, so anything he was offering that we hadn't done before wasn't dismissed simply because it didn't fit in. Everything he brings to the table has to be taken on board. I thought I'd landed on Gogo [Estragon] pretty well. To now play Gogo with another Didi means that I can't just go on giving my performance and hope that Roger will fit in. I have to be going out to him and be his Gogo.
After the first week, the blocking [where the actors stand on stage] I had got used to I discovered had been changed without my really thinking about it, because Roger had stood in a place and I just went up to him. It was a case of, "Oh, I see, that's what we'll now do."
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Early January
Over Christmas, Roger learnt the lines, so that on Monday he came in and we were able to just stand up and start doing the play. The temptation is for me not to give too much of a performance, because Roger is not giving a performance yet. That's not what's required in the rehearsal room. He's still exploring. Then I realised, on the second day, that's not very helpful to Roger. What I should do is give my Gogo full out so that he knows what he's going to meet.
I didn't read all the reviews last year, but I got the impression some people thought that somehow we were doing a cheap version of it, that we were exaggerating what could be thought of as funny in the play, at the expense of what could be thought of as extremely moving or intellectually challenging. I put this to people who knew Beckett, and every one of them said, "No, he would have loved it." It's perfectly obvious to me that Beckett, as a child, had gone to see the sort of stand-up comics and duos that I loved when I was a kid.
There is a great poetic passage about dead voices. We said to ourselves that there are dead voices in theatres, there are ghosts. And in fact, at one performance, Patrick saw a ghost on stage, who he thought had come up from the audience, wearing a long brown coat. He was just going to suggest to him that he get back in his seat, and he vanished. The Theatre Royal Haymarket has a famous ghost, Buxton, and, although I've not spoken to her about it, I'm told Judi Dench saw the same thing during a performance. But someone who likes Beckett a lot thought that passage had been reduced somehow, that we hadn't paid enough attention to the silences in the script. And I think probably we'll attend to that.
There are not many things in my life I can be absolutely proud of or certain I got right, but one of them is that I've got better as an actor. I've learnt how to do it. And I still have enough energy to do it. So it's joyful to me, in my 71st year, to be able to be in a play that is absolutely right for my age and my experience, and that is a popular success. What more could you ask as an actor?
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That's one of the reasons I want to go on doing it. I've never thrown away the hits. If something has been working, I've wanted to go on doing it. Why should you leave something that you know is good and a lot of people want to see, to go off and do something else that might not work half as well? I suppose because you're bored, but I'm not bored at all. I feel I'm the luckiest actor working.
Then, always to pull me back to reality, someone will chase me down the street and tell me how much they've enjoyed the Harry Potter movies. That is the other way of looking at my career. I'm now just one of those geezers who plays wizards. If people get us all mixed up, it just stops you getting too pleased with yourself.
Waiting for Godot previews at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, SW1, from Thursday