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Philip Quast has three challenging tasks as the star of Pan.
When it opens I'm seen as George Darling, the warm-hearted father of Wendy and her two younger brothers. He's the head of a middle-class London family in the Victorian era. As such he's a man to look up to and respect, but in reality George has trouble putting on his dress tie and his wife Mary is the one who makes the decisions and keeps things running smoothly.
Then, when Peter Pan flies away with the children to Neverland, I become Captain James Hook - the antithesis of everything George Darling is: Hook is evil.
When you want an actor who can perform multiple roles, Philip Quast - twice winner of the Olivier Award for Best Performance in a Musical - is your man.
Now an international theatre star, Philip shot to prominence as Javert in the original Australian production of Les Misérables.
He went to London to play the role in the West End, and was chosen by Cameron Mackintosh, from the hundreds who had played Javert to sing on the international cast recording and in the Tenth Anniversary Concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
Philip won his first Olivier Award - the highest honour in British theatre - for his second performance as George in Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, and his second in Cameron Mackintosh's production of The Fix.
Because I got both Oliviers for my roles in musicals some people think that this is my metier. In fact, I've only done a few musicals.
In 20 years, since he graduated from NIDA, Philip had notched up more than 80 hours of television comedy and drama in productions such as Fields of Fire, Brides of Christ, The Damnation of Harvey McHugh - and 17 years of Play School.
His stage credits include performances in West End productions such as The Hunting of the Snark and St Joan, half a dozen productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Sydney Theatre Company (with whom he won one of his two Sydney Critics Awards and three Mo Awards), MTC, Nimrod and the State Theatre Company of South Australia.
'I always try to discover the 'window' in my characters - in a bad man, or a villain, for instance, like Javert or Hook, the window is the moment that lets you realise that although you may not quite feel sorry for them, you understand how they got that way and you think: "There but for the grace of God ..."
Hook is deliciously vile of course, and you can play him for a lot of laughs - but I will consciously try not to play to the audience. Pan is a lovely mix of Frank Gauntlett's quite incredible language, beautiful and comic by turn, and something of the reality of a film. So, when we do our sword fighting, for instance, it has to look real.
The sword fighting, excuse the pun, is a killer. It's tremendously fast, much faster than anything I've done before, and I've done quite a bit. So it's exciting and spectacular in its own right, while at the same time being a clear metaphor of the conflict between good and evil.
© Nationwide News Pty Ltd.
