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Philip Quast spends a considerable amount of time passing on his knowledge, writes Michael Morley
Sitting in his dressing room in London's Adelphi theatre between performances as Juan Peron in Evita, Philip Quast sips a herbal tea and apologises for having to cut this interview short, as he's been told he needs to get a haircut (!) before the evening performance.
I agree that a short interview is a good interview – especially as I'm struggling to stay alert after flying in to London at 5 am that morning – and toss in a rather vague question to him about his upcoming appearances at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
Well over an hour later, he's still talking animatedly: hardly at all about his own career as a performer over the past 25 years, almost entirely about what he feels he has learnt as a performer in that time and why he is so strongly committed to passing this on to students whenever he has the opportunity.
Such generosity and openness have always characterised his work as a performer in theatre, film and TV: whether it is for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Belvoir Street, ABC TV (Brides Of Christ, and, for a generation of young viewers, Playschool) and cinema (the recent Clubland). Just on 25 years ago, I worked with him in the Playhouse on one of his earliest roles in music theatre – the ballad-singer in The Threepenny Opera. At an early run-through he delivered the opening stanzas of Mack the Knife as if he'd known the number all his life: no-one in the rehearsal room was left in any doubt that, along with real presence and an openness to and with suggestions, here was a genuine musical theatre star in the making.
Since then he's sung in Les Miserables in Australia and London, Sunday In The Park With George, South Pacific, Evita, and done a season of his own one-man show for the Donmar Warehouse – in between Shakespeare, David Hare, Chekhov and film and TV work. But in typically self-deprecatory fashion, it's the approach to learning and teaching the craft of musical theatre that he wants to talk about: not just the featured spot with Jeremy Sams, but the programmed workshop for students.
"I just hope they're not too good," he says wrily: "If they're fantastic, I won't have anything to teach them. But I'd hope to get them to look at the basic language of the theatre – the shorthand we can pass on. As you get older, you tend to let things go out the window, so you need to go back, to talk of transitions, choices, taking thoughts on the run, not indicating, not playing emotion. And the really simple things like faster, slower, louder, tighter. To remind them not to learn songs straight off at show tempo: they need to go back and reconsider the language."
He's been teaching workshops in music theatre now for over six years, and it's clear from his conversation that he not only enjoys the contact with students, but has a real gift for communication. And when he says that he loves teaching because it's humbling – "After a recent workshop, I found myself on stage that night performing and thinking 'I really know **** all' – "you realise that there's no fakery or pose here". It's of a piece with the way he tries to shape his career: he likes going back to Shakespeare, Michael Frayn or a film role after – as in this case – a year in the role of Peron.
And even when working in music theatre, he emphasises the importance of the text. "When we rehearsed with, say, Trevor Nunn, a large section of the rehearsal time was devoted to working only with the text, and leaving the music till later. If you sing the words all the time, you don't necessarily hear them."
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It's a concern for the relationship between words and music which is shared by Jeremy Sams, who is re-uniting with Quast for the first time since he conducted him in Sunday In The Park With George at the Royal National Theatre. But, as Sams points out, after that production Quast was a presence in his house – "I had his Olivier Award on my mantelpiece for some time, until he picked it up."
Again, in conversation, Sams emphasises the need to clarify and present the text. "My basic interest has always been in words and music, and how they go together." It's a fairly modest summary of a career which encompasses fluent and sparkling translations of Mozart's operas, work as a lyricist and composer (not just for the theatre, but film as well – his score for Enduring Love is a significant contributing factor to that film's effectiveness), major contributions as a musical director and, most recently, as the director of the current West End revival of The Sound Of Music.
One wonders, in fact, whether there might be three Jeremy Sams turning up for his appearances at the Festival, given his range of work. (As soon as he's finished at the Cabaret Festival, he's off to New York for a production, and then back to London to work on Feydeau's brilliant farce A Flea In Her Ear, which he is translating and directing, before doing the premiere of a piece with a distinguished pedigree – George Gershwin and PG Wodehouse's Damsel In Distress).
Meantime, there's the opportunity to catch him doing, among others, Weill and Sondheim: especially the latter. "The great thing about his songs is that he writes the acting in: even when you're not singing, he still writes in the thoughts for you." Given his background and experience, there is little doubt he will disprove, for Festival audiences, the adage that: "Of all the arts, music is practised most and thought about least."
© The Adelaide Review.
