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Sheridan Morley talks with Philip Quast
(reproduced here as transcribed by Gregor for the PQ Guide)
[Listen to the interview on our AUDIO page]
Sheridan Morley
My first star guest this hour is Philip Quast, who has had a triumphant week opening in the new National Theatre revival of South Pacific as Emile de Becque, the planter at the centre of that story, the lynchpin really of a doomed love affair which comes right at the end. Philip Quast of course triumphed at the National in Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George; he's back there now in what is in fact very often more a play with songs than a musical.
Philip Quast:
It certainly feels like that, we were all surprised when we were rehearsing it how at times we did feel we were in a Chekhov play; when we first did our Nellie and Emile scenes the cast sat there enthralled because they hadn't seen us rehearse any of those; the drama - the writing - actually caught us all out. Even Trevor, when we were rehearsing it, said this is extraordinary; the detail that's in the writing quite caught us by surprise, often.
SM
I think it's curious that we now think of the movie as this rather lush kind of Hollywood first division Technicolor, but of course the original show was banned in the Deep South because of the great song ‘You Have To Be Carefully Taught', which Oscar Hammerstein wrote, as he had indeed in Showboat thirty years earlier, about the intolerance of the American whites. It's always been a dark show in that sense, and I think the story now comes over with tremendous clarity about, in a way, the inability of people to live together when their skins are a different shade.
PQ
Mmm, and the film lightened a lot of things, even Emile de Becque - in this piece he actually strangles a man with his bare hands around his throat, and in the film he says he fought with this man and the guy fell and hit his head, and it's a big difference. We have a man now who won't fight, and there's an irony about that; he fought and killed someone deliberately on a point of principle, probably fascism, and yet he now won't fight when a whole country is fighting - legally killing someone on a point of principle.
SM
You've had an amazing life in musicals and done some very brave ones including The Fix and some early Sondheim. Did you come out of Australia with a view to being a musical comedy...
PQ
No, it's what brought me to England in the first place; I came over to do Les Mis after I'd done the Symphonic Recording but I had always thought of myself as wanting to be a classical actor - in fact I'd done a lot of movies when I was young, I did quite a few feature films...
SM
In Australia?
PQ
Yes, and I've done more television and film than anything else, and my upbringing was Anglo-Saxon and I was an Anglophile in that sense; everything I studied at school and university was to do with English history, I didn't study an American writer at all. It seemed a natural place to come, so when I first came here to do a film for Channel Four in 1985, I remember walking round the streets and crying, seeing places like Drury Lane that you'd only ever read about. I'm not ambitious in a sense, partially because I'm married and I've got a family; I've been married for quite a few years and it's always been a balancing act, and I'm lucky to be one of the only actors who really makes the transition between being at the Royal Shakespeare Company and - I've just been home before this and done a comedy series for television, and then doing Play School on ABC which I did for seventeen years...
SM
As long as that?!
PQ
Yes, and classical, and musicals, and I have to say that musicals are the greatest challenge of them all; they are the hardest thing to do, and I don't like doing them that often.
SM
But you're very good at playing outsiders in musicals, one thinks of Javert being an outsider and also Emile de Becque, this man who is a French planter who's come to the islands, he is not Tonkinese, he's not American, and he's the one who finally says to the Americans, ‘I know what you're fighting against but what are you fighting for?'.
PQ
Mmm, well I do personally understand; I think my upbringing was to do with isolated men, I suppose I grew up on a farm and there weren't many people, and I remember seeing my father work, and we were isolated. I sort of have a career in ‘angsted' individuals! But also I think being Australian makes a difference too; they're very brave in terms of emotional - they're not frightened to actually put their heart on the line a little bit I think.
SM
And I guess apart from John Shrapnel, who's wonderful as the Commander of the Island, a lot of the rest of the cast like you are, in a way, outsiders; we have a wonderful new actress playing Bloody Mary, we have a new American star playing Nellie, it's a company who really haven't been together in this country at all.
PQ
No, and even Ed is from South Africa, Ed who plays Cable, so it's really an international cast, and we've been brought together on this little island, it's sort of quite ironic. I've only worked with a couple of the company before, and that's quite surprising when you think about it, because of the way West End musicals seem to work - you just go from one to another and run into old friends, but a lot of people haven't worked with each other at all.
SM
I think it's very good also that we highlight - we keep saying - the darkness of this show, but in many ways it's a pioneering show, because it did tackle racism at a time when this was very unpopular. I also love the way that it gives the line: if you take the story of a strong woman from the outside who comes into an equally strong and difficult man's household, finally wins over the children and through the children wins him, you are describing South Pacific, but you are also describing The King and I and The Sound of Music. That storyline goes on right through the rest of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
PQ
And I don't know why, I don't know whether they felt they were outcasts in that world they grew up in, or what the driving force was, but as I said they're classical themes. There's not much difference between this and A Winter's Tale in lots of ways, or Pericles or any of those classics.
SM
And yet you still wonder about what will happen to the islands when the Americans depart.
PQ
Well that's another musical; I think it's funny how this musical ends on a rather subdued way, because you think it's only just the beginning of another story, but that's part of its thrill I think, well for me, is that you know that the curtain could rise at the very scene that it ends with, and start all over again.
SM
And song after song after song comes soaring out at you, there isn't a single dud number in the plot - indeed one number hasn't been heard before at all.
PQ
Yes, 'The Time Is Now'. And Mary Rodgers was in fact quite teary the day she came in to see it, because it was one of their favourite numbers and the reason it was cut, I gather, was partially because of producer pressure because the show was simply too long.
SM
They brought in, curiously, Emlyn Williams, who one thinks of as a very unlikely play-doctor. Emlyn took half an hour out of the running time the first time around, because it was like four hours.
PQ
I don't know whether they were used to longer shows, I'm sure they were in those days. Trevor tried to cut as much out as he could, but we can't pare it away any more without losing the detail, I mean he's done an extraordinary job in moving, for instance, 'This Nearly Was Mine'. Emile sang that originally to Joe Cable, and it seems quite an odd thing to do that a man sings. Now, now I'm alone' and soliloquises to another man on stage, so by moving it to the island and actually being alone makes it much easier to do.
SM
It's also amazing to have ‘Bloody Mary' open the show, because the show did always begin with 'Dites-Moi' as it ends.
PQ
Yes, it was book-ended; and again dramatically it gives Emile an entrance, because they talk about this man who's a loner and a misanthrope, and lives up on this hill.
SM
The tradition of recent National Theatre Rodgers and Hammerstein - Oklahoma! and Carousel, both went to the West End and then to Broadway. Is that the intention here?
PQ
We haven't heard anything, and I'm not sure; obviously musicals are under different pressures now because of what's happened in the last twelve months.
SM
But in the Rodgers' centenary, it would make perhaps very good sense to have another look at this one?
PQ
It would, and but after The Secret Garden I vowed I would never do another musical for a long time because I found them so exhausting and tiring...
SM
Was that the exhaustion of that show, again a very heavy score?
PQ
Yes, I think it was; also I feel I could only do one every two or three years because they require such a commitment on your private life and your family life, and there's great stress in a musical. Suddenly this came along, and I guess I'd do it - I worried about the French accent more than anything, but I had Joan Washington on board; she'd just finished working with Kate Blanchett on Charlotte Gray, so I've never been criticised for the French; and being Australian we have a pathological fear of languages, so the French accent's actually been quite fine.
SM
Philip Quast there, on a remarkable new revival of South Pacific which continues in the repertoire of the National Theatre on the South Bank - thank you very much for joining us.
