Elena Roger and Philip Quast
in Evita
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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 Miserables. 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.
Philip Quast in Evita
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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.