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Philip Quast, who is currently giving a powerhouse performance as Perón in Michael Grandage's production of Evita in the West End, is a substantial actor in every sense. When he played the braggart warrior Miles Gloriosus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum two years ago at the National, composer Stephen Sondheim (at an onstage platform interview in front of a packed Olivier Theatre) said that his favourite moment in the production was Quast's entrance. "You hear him offstage saying, in a booming, stentorian voice, ‘Watch out there, I take large steps!'" Sondheim recalled. "And he does. It's really inventive and funny." Quast takes large steps as an actor, too. After Forum, he went on to appear in the National's world premiere production of David Hare's Stuff Happens. He also recently played Lopakhin in a production of The Cherry Orchard at the Sydney Theatre Company in his native Australia. A three-time Olivier Award winner—he won for his performances in Sunday in the Park with George, The Fix and South Pacific—Quast has also worked in classical theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and his credits stretch from Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? to an acclaimed solo cabaret at the Donmar Warehouse. But if he's as serious as he is versatile as an actor, he's also affable and engaging company in his backstage dressing room at the Adelphi Theatre where Evita is playing.
You've been spending a lot of time in Australia recently. Where do you call home?
Here. I definitely feel when I come back here that I'm home again. I grew up in Tamworth, halfway between Sydney and Brisbane, on a farm, and that's where my father and brother still are, in fact. When I show people pictures, they ask, "My God, why are you living here in London, then?" But the answer is very simple. I don't like Australia politically, I feel betrayed by its politics, its xenophobia and racism, and I'm quite outspoken about it. I do not like the Prime Minister, it's a dangerous situation because he has control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, so that all those industrial laws that were fought over for years and years by the workers have gone by the by now, all in order that we can become more competitive with China now. Australia is not the country I grew up in. It's an American country now.
When did you first come to Britain? And when did you first work here?
I first came as a 28 year old. I'd already been working as an actor for a couple of years ago, and my wife and I came over and I did a little Channel 4 film. It was a couple of years before I came back to do Les Misérables. I had done Les Miz in Australia and then I had done the symphonic recording, which was the first of that sort of thing. The show had already turned into a leviathan, and suddenly we did that international recording and [producer] Cameron [Mackintosh] wondered if I could come over and do it here. My wife has a British passport because her father was British, so I became the first of a whole lot of Australians who followed. I seemed to start the whole thing off so that now half of Australia is here looking for work. The West End is full of Australians, especially the kids under 25 that can't get work in Australia because nothing runs there.
What did it feel like to be in the West End in a hit show that first time?
I remember crying at seeing places like Drury Lane for the first time—places I'd only ever heard about in The Beggar's Opera and things like that. Tell me about getting the lead role in the British premiere of Sunday in the Park with George at the National Theatre in 1990—a show that is now in the West End again. I've not seen it yet and I'd love to, but I'm not sure I will. It was a really difficult time—I was such a young actor. But I would love to go back and act it now—though I'm not sure I could sing it now, because I've got a bit lazy, possibly. Actually, that's not right—it's rather the demands that you put on yourself now are so great, and as you get older you expect more of yourself. It's partially pride, but there's also a lot more expected of you, too.
And you got the Olivier Award for it, too.
I was actually back in Australia when it was awarded, so I never picked it up myself. Jeremy Sams picked it up for me, and I remember getting it from him at some stage door in a crumpled old brown paper bag about a year later when I came back.
What was it like working with Stephen Sondheim on Sunday in the Park with George?
He was there a lot. I remember him coming into my dressing room one night and seeing a copy of Carousel there, and picking it up and saying, "The gods visited them when they wrote this." He looked at the "My Boy Bill" soliloquy and started going through it and showed me things about speech patterns in it. I remember him saying how pop music had destroyed language because it's about percussion and we no longer give words long sounds that are long sounds, short sounds that are short sounds or diphthongs that are diphthongs.
It sounds like a brilliant tutorial in musical theatre. Do you teach others at all?
Yes, I pop in and teach at the drama school I went to—the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney—when I'm there. I teach about acting in singing, which is not easy thing for people to get to grips with: To act and sing at the same time is a very hard thing to do. I remember seeing Hugh Jackman doing Oklahoma!, and if someone like that knows what they are doing, you relax, you sit back and enjoy it. You can tell when an actor comes on stage who is a good singer, and then you just relax. But I'm not sure people understand the work you have to put into doing it. Singing is hard for me. I'm not musical. I'm sure that some of the kids in Evita were shocked watching me in rehearsal. They'd seen the 10th anniversary concert of Les Miz, which is an iconic thing for many young people that they've watched over and over again, and then I get into the rehearsal room and I know fuck all. I have to start all over again because I don't learn things musically. Because people think I can sing well, they presume I'm a singer and that it's easy. But it's not easy. I've never had any training as a singer, and I find it hard.
Do you read music?
I sort of can, but I refuse to work and sing like that. Because what you sing is not as important as what you don't sing, I get out of time all over the place. They say it's easy. They count, "it's one and two…" And I say, fuck off about the one and two, because if I'm counting that and then coming in, I'm not thinking about what my thought is there. So what I have to invent is a whole subtext. It's about acting rather than singing. When I teach the students, I can see that when the piano starts they stop acting, and it's not until they're halfway through that they start getting into the acting again. So the first thing I say is to listen to the intro, and not to sing at all. I just want them to listen. I tell them to relax and just speak the words instead. That way they're not having to sing and count and produce the sound, all of a sudden something else happens. I got that from working with Trevor Nunn.
You worked with Trevor Nunn on South Pacific at the National, of course, and the directors you've been working with lately is roll call of talent.
When they asked me to do Democracy in Australia, I thought the chance to work with Michael Blakemore was one I couldn't pass up. He's a legend and phenomenal. And again, when I did The Cherry Orchard with Howard Davies, that's another director you cannot turn down, either. I had the most fantastic time with him. I've reached that age now where those classical roles are coming my way a bit more. I also did Trigorin in The Seagull at Chichester, directed by Steven Pimlott. To have worked with those directors, as well as Nick Hytner, Gale Edwards, Ed Hall, and now Michael Grandage, all within two years, is a wish list. I regard myself as the luckiest actor in the world.
You did a season once in Stratford-upon-Avon for the RSC. Would you like to do more classical work like that?
I loved it so much! I loved doing Shakespeare and I've not done enough. I love doing the classics, whether they're good or bad productions. Stratford gave me a real thirst for classical theatre, and I still haven't done enough and I want to do more. My accent may be a problem and whatever, but I don't care. It was great being at Stratford. I could go to Cicely Berry, the head of voice there, all the time. Whenever I wanted a voice class, I'd just book in and have one for free. I couldn't believe it—being able to work with this person who wrote The Voice and The Actor. Or I could go and work on a sonnet with Andrew Wade. And I also loved living there and walking across the Avon between shows to see the kids or take them to school. I just loved it.
You've got three sons who are now 16, 14, and 11 with your wife Carol, who is a schoolteacher. Family is obviously very important to you, as we saw in your solo cabaret at the Donmar Warehouse.
I didn't do cabaret until I reached an age when I knew something and had something to say. But what do I know about? I don't really know about anything, except being a father and being a son. My show became about that and being a man, too. I just wanted to sing bloke songs, and because I'm at ease with myself, I could sing anything. I got people like Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, Stephen Schwartz and Frank Wildhorn to give me new songs because I wanted to have all-new material—though it didn't work out that way because I wasn't getting good songs all the time.
And now you're back in another iconic musical Evita.
I'd been away in Australia a lot since the National season, so I needed a job that had money, and I got a chance to work with Michael Grandage. There's a great lack of book musicals now, and it's very hard. Even this is not really a book musical, so you have to create stuff that isn't there, or you do it as an oratorio, with microphones. What [original director] Hal Prince had done was to do a smoke-and-mirrors job on it. I saw it when I was a young actor in Adelaide, Australia, working with the South Australian Theatre Company, and I remember it very clearly. I can still remember the rocking chairs used in 'Art of the Possible'. I thought it was fantastic. But it's amazing how people distort things in their minds. I suspect that if we saw it now, really, we'd probably find it very camp. Our choreographer Rob [Ashford] was in an original touring production of Hal's version, and he remembers the dancing very clearly, like the boys doing the dressing of Eva. I'm not saying that it wasn't brilliant, but we discovered when we were doing this that there's all this music, and Hal had probably gone, "We need another eight bars here because a bit of a set needs to be moved." The scenes with the Perons were done in a bed originally, and I remember very clearly that he was in a robe all the time. But Michael Grandage has decided to leave it as a bare stage, to keep the story moving along. And when they wrote this 30 years ago they knew nothing about South America. So it's been re-orchestrated completely. There was a samba in there originally, which of course isn't Argentinian at all. Instead, what they've done now is introduced a lot more tango, which is very sexy and macho. People have asked why I wanted to do this show when I don't have that much to do, but I've found a way of making it important. I think I've invested a lot of stuff in it that's not necessarily there, and I love working with Elena [Roger, who plays Eva]. I think she's incredible. But if I wasn't a strong enough character, then you wouldn't necessarily believe why she'd want to hang her hat on my hook.
And you have to be fighting fit as well—you have to lift her.
She's 4'11 and easy to lift. But I stay fit cycling to work and swimming. Everyone thinks I'm fat, and maybe I am overweight, but I feel like I'm pretty fit. I'm 49, and I've still got to be able to bend down and pick a girl up, no matter how small she is, and lift her up to my shoulder and carry her. That's no mean feat at 49. It isn't!
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