London Calling with Champagne Charlie: 11th March 2009

Simon Paisley Day has wowed critics in the latest hit production of the Joe Orton Classic ‘Entertaining Mr Sloane’. Forty-five years it was first premiered in London and it seems alive today as it was back then.

Once critic has classed it funnier than Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’. Headed by Imelda Staunton, Simon Paisley Day backs her up as her rather limp and repressed brother Ed play by Simon. As we chatted between rehearsals he began to retrace the journey for him between the ‘page to stage’……

Champagne Charlie
When did you 1st hear of the part?

Simon Paisley Day
I heard about it the day before the audition. I didn't know the play or the part or the director. I knew Imelda's work and was very excited about the opportunity to act with her. My agent sent me the play by e-mail the day before the interview so I had a chance to prepare some scenes. I always enjoy reading for a part and cannot understand why some actors refuse to do it. It's useful for you as well for the director.

Champagne Charlie
Did you feel you'd get the part after the audition or are you apprehensive about these things?

Simon Paisley Day
I never try and guess really. Nick (Bagnell, the director) and I hit it off extremely well in the audition, and he laughed in all the right places so I suppose I thought I'd done okay. But you can never know who's going to come in after you, or indeed what pressure the producers are exerting on the director to cast a TV face. Luckily for me, they already had two very high profile names and Nick was able to cast who he liked for the parts of Ed and the father.

Champagne Charlie
Was the rehearsal process long and how did the director's approach differ from the way others had worked?

Simon Paisley Day
It took about six weeks in all, but there was a break in the middle for Christmas - a break of about nine days - which was both helpful (for line-learning - though it's arguable whether any lines went in properly amid all that booze and turkey and gift-wrapping) and disruptive as we had to crank things up again in early January and find the lost momentum. Fortunately Nick is a human dynamo and the rehearsal room was always full of slightly manic energy - very appropriate for an Orton. For all the many laughs we had in rehearsal, Nick was focussed and specific. His main thing was to deliver the truth of the play. He is very fond of the phrase 'keep it in the room', which is a fine mantra for a play that can sometimes want to spin off into loud and generalised madness.

Champagne Charlie
Why is Orton still so popular - what's his secret ingredient do you think?

Simon Paisley Day
I don't know his other plays but if they are anything like Sloane I think it's his ability to be heightened and real at the same time - he relishes language, and like Pinter he creates worlds of danger and repression that pulsate and then explode through language.

Champagne Charlie
How have your views on him changed since you've immersed yourself in the part?

Simon Paisley Day
I have learned to respect the writing hugely. There were some areas of the text that I distrusted - sections that simply didn't want to offer up a meaning, probably due to the characters' need for hiddenness - but as soon as we opened the play up to an audience all those areas became crystal clear. It is a play which more than any other I've done comes alive with the engagement of its audience.

Champagne Charlie
It's very different from your last role which was in a classical play - was your approach different then?

Simon Paisley Day
Timon of Athens is quite literally a mountain, with mammoth speeches, and hurtling from one extreme of the human condition to its polar opposite, from blithe innocence to snarling misanthropy. I performed it at Shakespeare's Globe last summer and early autumn in all weathers. By the beginning of October, standing in just a diaper in the cold night breeze, with a throat ripped to pieces by the demands of the space, I began to yearn for a theatre with a roof and a nice wool suit. Ed is certainly a challenge to play. All that buttoned-up desire and self-loathing makes him a twisted soul to inhabit for two and a half hours a night, but I love morphing into someone else on stage. In the last few years I have played a number of characters who are much more based on me (even the snarling misanthrope... no, not really), who speak like I do, who are fairly straightforward people, so it's thrilling to do some good old-fashioned character-acting again and slip into someone else's skin.

Champagne Charlie
Had you seen other productions and what do you feel you've brought out in your character that is different?

Simon Paisley Day
I've never seen the play either on stage or on screen. I came to it without any preconceptions, which is great.

Champagne Charlie
Working with so many top directors has it given you the taste to immerse yourself in directing or avoid it completely and stick to the acting?

Simon Paisley Day
The latter. I am a playwright as well so I have plenty of things to get on with between acting jobs! I assisted Trevor Nunn a year and a half ago on a production of Cymbeline for the Marlowe Society at Cambridge University (Trevor's Alma Mater), and this was an amazing experience. I was able to offer all sorts of technical help to the hugely talented - though untrained - cast of students. Trevor went off to NYC for three days in the middle of rehearsals so I was left alone to do a kind of acting master class. I did group work and one-to-one stuff. I found it exhilarating. Very often you can think that you know nothing until you're put into the position of teacher/director. I was and am humble about what I gave them but I know they got a fair amount out of it. All the stuff we seasoned actors take for granted - like not looking at the floor, not letting the ends of lines drop etc. Technical basics really. But no, I reckon I'll stick to acting for the moment.

Champagne Charlie
Do you get nervous before you go on as the run progresses or does that ease with time?

Simon Paisley Day
Sometimes you can get a wobble. Do I really know this line?  Have I said this line already or was that the matinee? Whenever I have a moment like that I manage not to panic overly. You only have to experience one or two major 'dries' to realise that it's absolutely fine - no one has died. You just forgot your lines, that's all.  It's just dressing-up for a living, isn't it?

 

Champagne Charlie
What things gone wrong in this or other shows you might have been in that now may seem funny but weren't at the time?

Simon Paisley Day
I realised halfway through a scene in Stoppard's Coast of Utopia at The National Theatre that I still had my cell phone in my pocket. I'd been speaking on it in the canteen at the interval and hadn't put it back in my dressing-room. It didn't ring but I make a dog's dinner of the scene because I was so nervous that it would start to ring...

Champagne Charlie
With the economy changing, do you think judging from the parts that are available - that audiences are expecting a different sort of show to reflect (or escape from) the times?

Simon Paisley Day
Yes, I reckon people are quite happy to have some escape right now, but then again it can cheer you up to watch something ghastly and depressing too - if only to make one realise how reasonable things are when you come out blinking into the daylight again. Yes, there's big economic shit hitting the fan, but at least I didn't screw my mother and kill my old dad.

Champagne Charlie
If you were allowed to cast yourself in any another show that has been running over the last year - what would it be and why that role / play?

Simon Paisley Day
Hamlet!
I'm happy to do it anywhere. A small cupboard somewhere will do. I understudied the great Simon Russell Beale seven or eight years ago - while also playing Horatio - we toured the USA with it, including BAM. Simon's very committed and healthy though. I never went on. I learnt all those damned lines. They must still be in there somewhere - behind the left ear - I think there's just enough time left to me before I graduate to Polonius...