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A Sevenoaks-educated Shakespeare star |
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Page 4 of 7
And that was
one night I was very glad I had trained at RADA, because I felt, I
should be prepared for this. It was a real step up for me. When you get
a part of that kind of scale and scope, it tests you to the limit in
terms of your acting, to be able to commit to finding all those
different moments and then sustaining them over a run.” He played the
part of Stanhope – the role in which Tony Blair starred as a schoolboy
actor at Fettes – for six months, and the play was a huge success. “It
was very intense, being together eight or nine times a week in this
bunker. We grew incredibly close.”
Next he returned to the National Theatre to take over from Stephen
Campbell Moore in Nicholas Hytner’s acclaimed production of Alan
Bennett’s The History Boys, playing the young history teacher Irwin.
When Michael Boyd stepped up to the top job at the RSC, Streatfeild
wrote to him. ‘I said I will happily murder someone to work with you
again.’ He found Boyd’s vision for the future of the company compelling
after a period of turbulence. “I wanted to be in on it. I was also
hoping for a part that would sustain me imaginatively over two and a
half years.”
I ask him how it felt sustaining this kind of slow-burning
theatrical event. “It’s been an exhilarating job, and fairly taxing.
Just the statistic of putting on eight plays in two years is quite
high. We’ve spent 54 weeks in total in rehearsal. We only stopped
rehearsing for the final time about two weeks ago when we arrived at
the Roundhouse. So the workload has been huge. Each play has had its
eight or nine weeks of rehearsal and then we have put it up, then
started rehearsing the next one, then put that one up, then got back to
rehearsing the next one. So the sensation has been of plates spinning
in the air and trusting that the plate you have left spinning is still
spinning when you return to it.”
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Last Updated ( Monday, 07 July 2008 )
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