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The Sydney actor Philip Quast has received one of London's most prestigious theatre awards, the Olivier Award, for his role as the artist Georges Seurat in the musical Sunday in the Park with George.
The Society of West End Theatres has singled out Quast for the most outstanding performance in a musical or entertainment.
The musical, inspired by Seurat's painting La Grande Jatte and written by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, also took out the award for best musical, in a weekend ceremony.
At his Redfern home yesterday, Quast said that he had completely forgotten about the awards until last Sunday night, when Jeremy Sams, the musical director for Sunday in the Park, had telephoned to ask him what he would like to say if he should win.
Quast assured Sams he wouldn't but instructed him, just in case, to simply say: "Thank you".
Immediately after the awards ceremony Sams rang back to say that he had accepted the award on Quast's behalf and had shared the telephone call story with the VIP audience. Sams told Quast that the National Theatre would ship the award to Australia in a small crate: "It's a bust of Olivier as Henry V. It is very heavy and very beautiful."
Quast first heard that he'd won from friends in London who were watching the ceremony on television and phoned him at 6am on Monday. He went to London in 1989 at the invitation of the producer Cameron Mackintosh to play the role of Inspector Javert, which he had created to great acclaim in the Australian premiere of Les Misérables. Quast played the role for six months in the West End.
Towards the end of his contract he auditioned for Sunday in the Park with George. He auditioned four times - all of them bad - in his opinion. The last two were in front of Sondheim, the second of which turned into a music tutorial for the audition pianist, who was also struggling with the score.
Even now, having received the award, Quast is ambivalent about what it means. He says he feels a mixture of relief and embarrassment. "When my wife, Carol, asked me how I felt I said: 'Relieved. Now I won't have to tell people I didn't win it.' But it definitely makes me think I want to go back. I was offered a role in Into the Woods after Sunday and Stephen Pimlott also offered me work at the Old Vic, where he was going to direct two plays, Botho Straus's The Park and A Midsummer Night's Dream.
"But I got home-sick. What worries me is that when I got Sunday in the Park people here were saying: 'Oh, you've made it.' We still have this notion that if it's 'over there' it's better. But I don't necessarily believe that the standard is any better over there, at all," Quast said.
"I realise now that I spent all that effort trying not to be Australian for the first four or five weeks of the musical and that got in the way. Then in the last three weeks I stopped worrying about it. I stopped worrying about trying to hide the twang or being caught out because I don't think the English basically care. They are now so used to all sorts of people coming in with all sorts of different accents but, in my 16 months, when it suited them, to rub my nose in being antipodean, they did it," said Quast.
© The Sydney Morning Herald
