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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.
(...)
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).
(...)
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."
© The Adelaide Review.
