From the time I did The Ghost Train, to working with my friends on various film related projects, up to my first steps onto the Arundel Fringe, I have mostly played funny characters, or at the very least the straight man to the funny guy, and after a while, it began to really irritate me. Even when I was auditioning for Our Country's Good I wanted to play Major Ross who is a right bastard, but the director said "You're far too nice to play that character."
So while I was having a chance at versatility stomped on by all and sundry at college, when I left and started doing productions with local acting groups, I found myself going down the same road again, doing farce and comedies (although doing Ayckbourn had been an ambition of mine which I fulfilled during this period) that I had started giving up hope of ever doing anything remotely serious or downright evil.
Thank heavens for Drip Action Theatre!
In 2010, after a couple of stints at the Arundel Festival on their theatre trail, Drip Action's artistic director, Bill Brennan, made me an offer I couldn't refuse. To date, it is still my best role, and one I will never forget. Five years later, I still remember the majority of my lines, including the four or five speeches I had sprinkled throughout the piece. I was Ralph Wantage in Bryony Lavery's Frozen.
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| As Ralph in Frozen, March 2010 |
The play centres on just three characters: Ralph, who is a loner looking for a distraction, mainly in the form of young girls; Nancy, the mother of his latest victim; and Agnetha, an American psychologist who is drawing up a study on the criminal mind and uses Ralph's case as part of her research material.
This was a moment for me that had been a long time coming, and after reading the script, I was stunned and shocked at first that I would be considered for such a role as Ralph. It was going to take me down some very dark places, especially in my research. I had to read it a few times before I said yes. I take every role I accept very seriously, and I was going to have to become someone that was my complete antithesis.
First off, I knew I wanted to make Ralph seem as ordinary as possible, so I focused some of my research on the case of Roy Whiting who was convicted in a high profile child murder case here in the UK some years ago. Images and sparse amounts of footage of the man showed me someone who would have been quite easy to overlook in such a case, and that was the quality I wanted to bring to my interpretation of Ralph.
I also researched psychological studies relating to paedophilia and child murder, the motivations behind such crimes, and the reasons perpetrators gave for committing them. It was the scariest, most unusual research I had ever done for a role, and it made me itch every time I looked deeper into it.
I brought my research and ideas to the table. Pennie was once again my director, and she knew my capabilities and it made the relationship more collaborative - we were both navigating unknown territory in our chosen fields and a lot of what we decided was based purely on instinct.
As rehearsal went on, and the background Lavery gave Ralph became more and more evident, I actually began to feel sorry for him. That edge of sympathy that I felt towards him made me determined to make the audience feel the same way by the end of the play. I wanted them to feel a connection with his character other than revulsion. I wanted them to see that he was a human being, not just a monster.
As performances came and went, we lost something in the region of between two and six audience members per night at the interval. For obvious reasons, some people simply could not handle it. If anything, I saw that as a compliment from those that chose to leave - it meant we were getting the message and the story across in as vivid a way as possible.
This production changed my whole perspective on acting as a discipline as well as an art. It was certainly the first time that I had heard directly from audience members how they believed everything that was happening in front of them on that stage, even to the point that some of them asked me where I had acted professionally and who my agent was, and what other productions I had done and at which theatres.
It was then that the little seed was planted which, just over a year later, would germinate and begin to grow with the kernel of an idea that I was ready to go pro.
After that, I was generally cast as the bad boy in a number of other productions: Collaboration by Ronald Harwood in which I played the Nazi minister Hinkel; Happy Now? by Lucinda Coxon in which I played Miles, an alcoholic husband who constantly talked down to his wife and made her life a misery while trying to keep his reputation going as a party animal and all round fun guy.
I'm hoping that things continue to go in varying directions like this in the future, in my voluntary roles and (hopefully!) professional life.
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