 |
|
|
|||
|
Interviews
|
|||
|
|
Drive, Conscientiousness and a "Sort of Pride" in His Work Sheila Connor talks to Neil Pearson Knowing that I was going to interview Neil Pearson I brought his photograph up on the screen. My computer is obviously female. She was so overcome by the sight of this dreamboat with the sexy eyes that she spontaneously closed herself down and had to reboot.. I hope he doesn’t have this effect on all the females in the audience during his forthcoming tour of Harold Pinter’s Old Times in which he is appearing with Janie Dee and Susannah Harker.
I asked how rehearsals were going. “Well, we’re at the stage when you usually have no idea,” he said. “The play is in bits around us on the floor and we’re looking at all the bits and wondering how to put them together again. It’s absolutely the usual place to be at this stage of rehearsal and a bit unnerving whenever it comes, but it’s going fine. It’s a very rich and complex play – one of its themes is unreliability of memory and it makes for a very painstaking and almost forensic rehearsal process. It’s coming on!”
The director – Peter Hall – has directed this play a number of times previously. In fact, I believe Pinter dedicated it to him as a birthday present, but he’s coming back to it after a long time away.
Pearson has worked with him before, one time at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in a Feydeau farce called Mind Milly for Me in which he starred with Felicity Kendall. As he pointed out, “Obviously a French farce and a Pinter play have little in common, but Peter is equally forensic and equally enlightening with both,”
Pearson first shot to fame in the topical television comedy series Drop the Dead Donkey and has since appeared in numerous memorable productions in television, film and theatre, including a superb theatrical staging of Taking Sides with Julian Glover, a representation of the life of the late John Diamond, and he had an interesting year in post apartheid South Africa with Nelson Mandela as president, when filming the BBC biopic of Cecil Rhodes
I had heard it said (I understood by him) that he lacked ambition, so I asked what he meant by that, and how he chose what to do next.
“Don’t have any ambition?” he laughed. “Well – I have drive, I have conscientiousness and I have a sort of pride in my work. I also have a curiosity about what to do next, and it is that rather than an Empire building careerist approach that decides me. Acting has given me a very nice life and I like to think I’m good at it, but I’m not vocational about it. I think that’s what I’ve said before. As much as I love my job, it’s what I do when I’m not doing the rest of my life, so I choose carefully because I know how much it consumes me when I’m doing it. I’m delighted to be involved with this show and looking forward to getting it on the road.”
Does he like touring? “I enjoy touring – it appeals to my low attention span! I like spending a week in each place and then moving on. I’ve done a lot of West End runs before and I’ve enjoyed them, but I like getting out and about so this should be fun”
Pearson began acting in school plays while at a state run boarding school in Suffolk. He enjoyed it so much that he auditioned for drama school, was accepted, and has never looked back, considering himself very lucky to have found his vocation so young. He has no particular plans for the future. “I’m doing this until May, and for an actor that’s pretty well as much job security as you can get – so I have no plans, and that’s how I like it.”
|
||
|
|
