Richard Armitage in Conversation Transcript – Part One
Posted by Lisa-Marie Burrows On September 05, 2014 0 Comment


(Apologies for the quality of sound, it was very hard for the dictaphone to pick up on it clearly in the theatre).

Sat under the blaring, yellow spotlights, two red chairs and a single wooden table were placed strategically centre stage at the Old Vic in London.

The chattering audience was abuzz with excitement and sat patiently anticipating the arrival of the man they had all come to see – that man being Richard Armitage.

To a rapturous and welcoming applause, he took his place stage left and smiled graciously at his spectators, ready for his potential grilling by theatre critic Matt Wolf to discuss all things The Crucible – the play he is currently starring in as John Proctor.

MW: Many thanks to Richard Armitage for speaking with us today. I saw the preview for this production and actually wrote the preview for this, 5 or 6 performances in. Now it’s in the last two weeks of the run, is it a very different production?

RA: It’s hard to know because we have been with it every single day it’s a bit like watching your child grow or trying to lose weight. It certainly has embedded in me deeper than that first exploration in front of the audience. The first time we performed it I was so shocked at the laughter of the play, the humour, the gasps, the shocks, the breathing of the audience and the emotion by the end of them. That has stayed with us throughout the run. I think we are just so much deeper into it so the descent of my character and the ascent, hopefully is higher.

MW: How did you end up in the production? It has been a dozen years of war since you last did a play in London…

RA: According to the Daily Mail it has been 13 years! My agent and I thought that… every year we talk about doing a play and in my head I thought it had only been five years since I had been on stage, so when I read that it had been 13 years, I was shocked and slightly ashamed. But it wasn’t for want of trying. What we were looking for is exactly what we had found at this moment in time. What I believe in really is that it’s about being in the right time and place. This particular play and this particular director, in this theatre, in this configuration, it just felt absolutely right. We talked about doing something that would be an event and certainly for me, it feels like it has been a real event and I’m sorry that we are in our final two weeks now.

MW: So, was there a sort of phone call? John Proctor, Old Vic, Yael Farber, yes or no?

RA: It was a ‘do you want to do The Crucible?’ I said ‘yes’ because it’s a play that I coveted since I was at drama school. When I was at drama school, there were four actors playing John Proctor in my first year and I tackled Act 4 of the play, so I had a tiny sample of what this character was and I was a 20-year-old actor who knew nothing about life, so coming back to it in rehearsals, or even the potential to come back to it, something had touched me and ignited me and my teachers. You know when you have done something significant because nobody says anything and everyone of my tutors looked at me and I knew that I had done something different. So the chance to come back and explore that, as a… 42-year-old… (giggles), it was kind of exciting and thrilling.

I was filming up in Leeds, I was on an independent movie and Yael travelled up. I think we had about an hour because she was about to go on to a plane to go back to Montreal. We met for breakfast and I was absolutely exhausted and so was she and she said ‘what scares you about this play?’ I said ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’ She said ‘why?’ and I said ‘the play makes me want to burn my own flesh off my body and I can’t do it.’ She said, ‘well I will take you there. I will take you to the edge. We will go there together.’ It’s something I have never forgotten – that meeting. I’m so glad that we did go to the edge together.

MW: So what was the experience of having 25% of the play already in your muscle memory like?

RA: The final quarter of the play are words that I still find them hard to say and hard 20 years ago, but I never had to revisit a kind of drill of learning the lines of that portion, it somehow stayed in my mind, or somewhere in my body. It was just a gentle reminder of what the words were and what they meant. Every night I get to Act 4 and think what a privilege it is to take a character to that place with those lines. Sometimes I think ‘ I don’t know if I can do this today. I don’t know if I can get there, but the play takes you there, the lines take you there and Miller absolutely takes the character from there to there. When he calls to God at the end and I sort of see a particular light and for some reason it just catches me in the eye and I feel an ascent. It’s amazing. With a great playwright like Arthur Miller, you know why when you are inside the character like that.

MW: It’s been a pretty extraordinary year in London for American plays, was the American cannon a large part of your training when you were in LAMDA?

RA: We were very lucky. We had an opportunity to explore drama, which was largely based on classical theatre, so you start with Shakespeare, Greek, but we did tackle Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, Arthur Miller… so I had a taste of everything and obviously The Crucible is on many curriculums in school…The whole point of theatre is being introduced to other cultures and find your introduction to other cultures.

MW: Was it interesting finding the voice for this role? Not just how he should sound, but also to get you across eight shows a week and across three months?

RA: Yeah, it was an ongoing experiment I suppose. Often when I tackle characters for TV or film, you have to decide what kind of voice you are going to produce and then go away and work on it. With this, I never made that decision. We decided on a certain vernacular, a dialect, which would be appropriate, so they felt like commoners. I also wanted a commanding voice. I felt like a man who worked out in the fields, calling to his animals. I wanted a certain tone, which commands authority. (Reads out a description of Proctor by Arthur Miller).

When I first met Proctor, I felt like a fool in his presence and I tried to figure out why. It is still something to do with that dignity, despite his grassroots. I think that the fact that he had the ability to make others feel foolish, he was singled out as someone who would be defended by others and that’s exactly what happened to him in the play. It resonates with others… sorry you’re talking about the voice aren’t you… (bursts of laughter) My voice is something, which has evolved throughout the play and I think I had one particular dodgy matinee where I got a bit of carrot stuck in my throat from Elizabeth Proctor’s stew and literally for the other half of Act 2, I am trying to choke my way through and then after that at the stage door everyday were pots of honey. I work with a teacher who is a brilliant woman and guided me through this. Ten years ago when I wanted to go back onstage, I got into contact with her and I said ‘I need a voice. I need to find that voice again.’ It (the voice) has been a constant maintenance.

MW: You said it was ten years ago when you wanted to go back on stage, so it has taken ten years…

RA: Well, I called her and went ‘do you remember that conversation…?’

MW: You were saying that one of the attractions of this was the configuration of course, what was it about being in the round that was important to you?

RA: It’s interesting because I was in a musical called ‘Cats’ years and years and years ago, and all of my favourite plays at drama school was in the round, so my experience of theatre at its best has been either in traverse or theatre in the round. I love that immediacy and the way as an audience member I like being in the round as well. It’s great because you get to see the audience across the space experiencing the same play. There’s something very particular about this play, as an audience we become a witness as to what is happening and we witness each other witnessing it. I think that has ignited every audience member who has come and seen this play. It will be sad to see the Old Vic go back to its familiar state, but it is a national monument so it should.

MW: Actually, I’d like to talk more about that sense of having the audience so present, do you feel it brings the audience in or do you feel distracted by what somebody is doing in the front row?

RA: The audience is as fascinating as the people on stage – not visually – I have 21 other faces that are compelling me in this space, but you have to sense the audience and we feel the audience acutely. As I said earlier on; breathing with the play, laughing with the play, crying with the play, gasping with shock and being outraged, sometimes you can really hear a vocalization of that, which actually feeds the play, it propels us forward, it makes us dig deeper. Obviously the mobile phones are… actually we have been very lucky, we have had one or two and we came to an agreement that we would stop and not make it an issue. I like the fact that the audience feel that they can be vocal and that they are as present in this world as we are. Sometimes you just blur your eyes slightly when you get too close to someone who is wearing a very bright outfit. I think Yael really wanted something to cover the first couple of rows with some black clothing, so that for other audience members there wasn’t any bright colour in this dark, somber world, but I think that is something which was too hard to achieve and at the same time I do think it’s quite good that we do see each other in the front row.

MW: I have seen a lot of productions of The Crucible, but I have never seen a production that has the atmosphere of this one, all the attributes that we associate with Yael. She seems to have such a particular directorial signature. How important was it to you that she was bringing all of these things to the play and what was it about her direction that has really helped the production and you?

RA: She has a very acute awareness of what she calls the ‘viscera’ – I had to Google it to find out what it meant! It’s a full-bodied matter that’s in your body. It’s where the emotions are kept that are in your body, not in the mind, so anything from the neck up is highly intelligent and has its equal place on stage, but she is interested in a full body experience. When Cheever comes in in Act 2 to take my wife, I don’t feel it in my head, I feel it in my stomach, in my knees and in my bowels and that’s exactly what she has programmed the play to be. She worked very closely with a fantastic movement director called Imogen Knight; both of them were inspired by so many different influences. We were listening to some similar music: Arvo Pärt…. And all of those things seem to marry at the same time and it was the first day of rehearsal that we were all in the right rehearsal room with the right people. It was almost accidental.

MW: It is such a detail or affect that must have been there when you were finally putting it all together and it must be in a sense quite startling for the cast to see what they have to do…

RA: I remember we never sat down at the table and read the play; we were always on our feet. We started working on Act 1 got that together and then we would work on Act 2, then we would go back to Act 1 and out Act 1 and 2 together. I remember the terror of getting through Act 1 and thinking, ‘God, that was pretty tough’ and then getting to the end of Act 2 and sort of being on my knees vomiting in a bucket, just from Act 1 and 2, then putting Act 3 on the end. Then, when we finally did all four acts and I was sat in corner shaking and Yael came over to me and said ‘are you ok?’ I said ‘yeah – and we have to do this twice on Wednesday’s and Saturday’s!’ (laughter from the audience).

It’s a bit like running the marathon where the landmarks help along the way, so you recognise; ok I am there in the journey. It’s where the play just sort of takes you and then suddenly you find yourself at the curtain call, but you don’t quite know how you got there… Was that your question..? (laughter).

Part two of the transcript and soundbites will be posted soon.

Please feel free to leave your thoughts below:

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For you Richard Armitage fans, part 2 of his transcript from the 'In Conversation' event is coming soon...

This is part two of the Richard Armitage in Conversation Transcript. You can read the first one here.

MW: I think people are curious that after a Wednesday and Saturday matinee, you have a very quick turnaround. How do you perform again in an hour? Do you have a huge breakfast?

RA: The resolution which I have adopted is not drinking. You just have to plan your day and we all do a warm up together, a vocal warmup. You just take it step-by-step. There was a point where I thought I might be able to do a version of the show, a matinee version, which is sort of like a marked version, but it’s simply not possible. The play grabs you by the throat and no matter how much you think ‘I have got to do another one’ you can’t, you just have to play it beat, by beat, by beat. Anna who plays Elizabeth, we looked at each other before the beginning of a matinee and she said to me, “I am going to bring a chair onto the stage with me and see what happens next.” But it’s what Yael always says to us, ‘Let the play happen to you. You can’t decide how you are going to play the play. You have to take it step by step and indeed the play happen to these characters and if you let that happen, you will find yourself in the second show on a Saturday night with a massive rush of energy and the ability to play that final scene.’

MW: So on Sunday, do you sleep all day…?

RA: I’m at the gym at 8 o’clock on a Sunday! (Giggles)

MW: Did you go to Massachusetts? Did you tour around there?

RA: I did. I always wanted to go to Salem for many, many years, simply because I read the play and I was fascinated, but there was never the right opportunity, so this of course this was the perfect opportunity. I drove and I got there as the sun was setting strangely on a really beautiful, spring evening, so in that line in the play where John says “Massachusetts looks beautiful in the Spring” I know what that looks like because I went there in that moment, when the sun was setting and that’s why I do those things because it’s like programming your sense memory full of images that you would never normally have. I saw the place where Proctor’s house was, I saw the brook that runs by his field, I saw the clearing in the woods where supposedly the girls danced and the pathway where Proctor walked from Salem village to Salem town. Rebecca Nurse’s house is quite complete in its construction and there’s a tiny child’s cot in the house, which I took photos of and brought back for Anna. There was just something about the child’s cot, with the puppet… All of these things just help you to focus your mind when you are about to enter into Act Two. I can close my eyes and I know where he was seated, I know where he’s been, especially when he says “I have been planting seeds near the forest edge,” that’s true, but I think there’s a moment that he takes before he comes back into his house and he has a place where he goes to contemplate and I know where that is because I went there. It enriches you so that you do have an image of what you are thinking.

MW: It is very easy to think of John Proctor as a symbol, one that is written about in essays, but you play first and foremost the character, tell us about the decision to play him in three dimensions and not as a symbol…

RA: I never got to the point where I discovered this symbol of him. I, of course, look at him as primarily a person who in that time is all about what they do. Survival was first and foremost his priority, his life, the toils of puritans in that period of time were excruciating and their lives were extremely difficult and that was the primary starting point for me. Trying to replicate that was something we were working on quite acutely in the rehearsal room because we have a very easy life and to try and disregard that and figure out what happens to these people on a day to day basis was really important. We worked on lots of physical exercises, mine was sharpening an axe for four hours and really the first few minutes you think ‘I know how to sharpen an axe’ and then after four hours you think ‘Ok, I really know how to sharpen an axe.’ When I was in America visiting Salem, I went to a farm and I worked for a couple of days with cows… mucking out cows, sweeping out their urine and just getting a sense of what that daily toil would have been. Then you find the body of the character and then you can figure out what Miller starts to put into his mind and his heart.

MW: It’s interesting that it talks about McCarthyism, but what’s more interesting I think is the way it’s relevant to what is happening right now. That must be so fascinating to play eight times a week?

RA: It is. Also the genius of his playwright is that he knew that when he was writing about McCarthyism, that he wasn’t just writing about this period of his life, which is why he wrote a parable or whatever it is, he knew people would be revisiting this piece of work again and again and again. Part of the preparation for me, for the play, is to come in everyday an hour early and I read quite a few letters from people and I have a letter that I want to share a small piece of. I’m not going to say who wrote it, but it really touched me… (Reads a letter from an individual who grew up on the outskirts of Berlin and made references to the knocking down of the wall and asking the person’s father about TV programmes they were able to watch and all of the problems of the 1950s).

I get a letter like this probably everyday from somebody somewhere… I had a letter from a young boy who is living in Gaza at the moment who feels the same thing. He hasn’t seen the play, but he has been on the internet and he’s googled the content of the play and the responses of people to it and the letter is still here and it will be here for some time, which is why the liberty and the freedom we enjoy in the United Kingdom is hard won, but must be defended. There is always that looming shadow that will eventually find a foothold in times of crisis and gives us the potential to do to each other these terrible things that Miller refers back to in 1692. (Receives a long round of applause from the audience).

MW: Given the depth of the people and their experiences, going into the last eleven days, is there a sense of sadness that it’s coming to an end or a sense of satisfaction?

RA: It’s a bit of both actually. There’s a sense of ‘How many more? How many more have I got left in me?’ I do feel run through at the end of a show. I always think ‘I don’t know if I can do another one,’ yet you find the ability to do another because I read that letter before the show. I do think that on behalf of the Company that there is a sense of a job well done, but we can always go further and it’s something that Yael has installed in us from the beginning. Even on that last performance, I will still be picking up that script and looking to see if there’s something else I have missed, something we haven’t quite found. In a long run like this, well it isn’t that long as it’s 12 weeks, but the best thing you can have is a new idea every night, whether it’s one idea or a new line that you have never heard before and thankfully I hear new things every time that I perform this play…. a new idea or a new word will hit me and that’s because as a Company of 23 people, who have been absolutely committed to the play from the beginning, no one comes in half-heartedly and no one’s on their phone in the interval, everyone is absolutely there.

MW: Some questions were submitted and in our remaining ten minutes before Richard goes to get ready for tonight’s performance, we will just throw out a couple of the questions. These are chosen at random. This one is perfect for what we have just been saying: ‘After performing such an intense role for so many weeks, would you consider doing a musical or comedy?’

RA: A musical, not! One of the projects we looked at was The Rover a short while back and it never quite happened because we couldn’t find the right venue and again the event wasn’t quite going to happen for us, so, yeah a comedy would be a great antidote to this play.

MW: Here an interesting one: ‘After such a long run, what will John Proctor leave behind?’

RA: Erm…It’s really hard to answer that question until I have started to try and leave him behind myself. There was another question that came up actually about how I put him down at the end of the night and it’s a very weird process when you come off stage because I go in the shower and wash all of the blood off, which is weirdly symbolic and I sort of say thank you for coming back and visiting me again. I sort of feel disrespectful if I try to shrug him off, throw him aside and I greet people at the Stage Door, but I am still quite bewildered – I hear noises in the distance, but I can’t quite see people because he is still sort of there and I haven’t fought that, I have let that be there because I need him again tomorrow night. I don’t know what he will leave behind, I really don’t know that yet.

MW: Here’s another one: ‘Does Mr Armitage have a favourite scene or even a line in The Crucible? Or is there one where you think, ‘thank goodness that’s over?!”

RA: I have to say one of my favourite parts of the play is the beginning of Act Two. I think Miller wrote the first Act which he calls an overture and I love music, I listen to a lot of classical music… The overture is the part where the composer demonstrates all of the themes that you are going to hear over the course of the night and Act One is such a whirlwind, it’s full of repetition and all of these themes get thrown up in the air. The beginning of Act Two, you are into this sort of very kind of painful, broken relationship that is trying to heal itself and I just love walking into the space and feeling that kind of looming danger in the air of what you had just seen in the overture and then figure out how we go on from here. You see these two characters attempting to heal their life and move forward and I love that part.

MW: Do you listen to music offstage in your dressing room to help focus you?

RA: A lot of stuff I listen to is by a composer called David Darling, who wrote a great cello suite, which I listen to a lot in the dressing room. My own stuff that I brought was Arvo Pärt and I listened to something called ‘Forty Eight Responses to Polymorphia’ by Penderecki, which is very, very disturbing! It’s violins, but it sounds like screaming and it disturbs me, which is good to bring on that sense of imbalance in the play, so that’s usually playing in the dressing room, which keeps lots of people away! They will go to knock on the door and go “Oh no… I will come back later…”

MW: Do you have a pre-show ritual gets you in the space…?

RA: I have vomited in Act Four, I have passed water in Act Four… nobody knows this… (giggles), so I don’t tend to eat too much because it finds its way back out again. I do a physical warmup, there’a a sort of ticking clock to the beginning of the play and I have found myself in a ritual, not through any sense of superstition, but because I like to switch the lights off and sit in the dark.

MW: After your 13 years away from the stage where you have been doing film and television work, where you can look at the rushes and see how you are fairing, what is it like to come back to a discipline where you can’t step outside of yourself and look at it?

RA: It’s all I ever knew. I came from a background of theatre and for a long time I found myself very uncomfortable in those first few moments before you stepped on stage where that lump comes into your throat and you’re frightened and terrified about doing it, but weirdly, coming back to it at the age that I am, 13 years later, I don’t feel the same kind of fear… I feel the engines starting to run, I feel the adrenaline rising in me. I watch the monitor just under the stage before Proctor enters at the beginning and I watch the play and I find it so disturbing when Betty screams, when she is dragged across the stage by Abigail, that scream sort of propels me into the play. All of the fear that I’m feeling is somehow channelled through that scream and taking Proctor over the stairs, of course they are in a time and place in their lives where they are full of fear, so we all bring that fear to the stage with us.

MW: This is a very harrowing play at certain times, do you guys get together afterwards?

RA: I wish I could. They get down fifteen minutes before us, so they get into the bar first, but of course I’m not drinking, so boring old me gets to go home. We haven’t but we should…

MW: By playing John Proctor, have you changed as a person? If so, how?

RA: I am sorry to disappoint the person that asked that question, but I just don’t know. I suppose I already feel changed in that I think I have opened a part of myself, or Proctor has opened a part of myself, or somehow I have opened a part of Proctor, I don’t know which part of that is, but it had frightened me before and I guess I am no longer afraid. (Huge round of applause and Armitage quickly exits the stage).

Was er wohl immer hört, wenn er mit seinen headphones durch die Straßen Londons läuft? Oder dienen die eher als Abschreckmanöver, um nicht angesprochen zu werden ?

Wenn ich immer Penderecki/Goodman usw. in "freier Wildbahn" hören würde, liefe ich immer mal gegen einen Laternenpfahl ...

... each in his way wondered wether forgiveness could ever match the extent of vengeance, wether love could ever match the extent of indifference, wether joy was the foe of what the priest called peccata mundis or merely the companion. The desert passed speechless below them. The stars reverberated like a scatter of diamonds...

" ..Boring old me.." Ja, ja !