Adrian Lester

Q&A Adrian Lester

What was your first non-theatre job?
Cleaner in a residential care home.

What was your first professional theatre job?
Walk-on role in Birmingham Music Theatre’s touring production of Sweeney Todd.

What is your next job?
Rehearsals for The Lehman Trilogy start next month.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
Work hard and worry less.

Who or what was your biggest influence?
There have been so many – from actors and directors I’ve worked with to people I have watched closely, including James Earl Jones, Sidney Poitier and Ira Aldridge.

What’s your best advice for auditions?
Actors have power in the room. All the people present want the best person for the job – you just have to relax and understand that is you, even if they don’t see it.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?
No.

Rehearsing Hymn for a live audience

A key ingredient of the play’s success is the chemistry between Lester and Sapani, and that sense of connection will be easier to establish now the actors are allowed in physical proximity with each other (due to Covid-19 restrictions, they were choreographed to stay largely apart during the streamed version).

“This time, I’m allowed to actually pass him a glass of water,” Lester laughs. “Or if he moves a chair and I then pick it up, I can do that without having to wipe my hands down. That does make things a lot easier.” He says that the challenge of doing a two-hander live is that bit more intense, especially in a venue as intimate as the Almeida: “There’s absolutely nowhere to hide with this play – you can’t be off at any moment.”

Lester is full of praise for director Blanche McIntyre, who returns to the Almeida following her acclaimed production of Ella Hickson’s The Writer in 2018. “The beauty of her direction is that you feel like you spend a lot of time talking about characters and moments, but she hasn’t actually directed you. She doesn’t tell you what to do, or really what not to do, we just talk about it. In that sense you don’t know where her work stops and your work begins.”

There is one section – a dance sequence incorporating 1980s tunes – that had to be tightly blocked otherwise, as Lester says, “we would have hurt ourselves – we’re not as young as we used to be”. He credits movement director Robia Milliner and musical director DJ Walde, alongside McIntyre, for bringing this central moment in the show together. It also provides him and Sapani with a nice trip down memory lane, revisiting some of the ‘bangers’ of their youth. “I remember listening to these songs as a teenager – they’re all in there, for those of a certain generation,” Lester smiles.

Work and family life in lockdown

It helps that his understanding with Chakrabarti is about as close as any actor-writer relationship can be. They met as students at RADA in the late 1980s, married in 1997 and have two daughters.

How was home life during lockdown? “As for everyone, it’s been quite hard for us all to be held in one position, not really working or leaving the house,” says Lester. “And then there’s the anxiety, worrying about what we’ve touched and where we’ve been, and worrying about loved ones.”

They’ve been lucky that work hasn’t stopped entirely. Lester has appeared in projects including the BBC comedy Staged – “I really enjoyed sending myself up” – and the National Theatre’s streamed Romeo and Juliet, while Chakrabarti is “arguably the busiest she’s ever been” with writing work.

‘I’m enjoying the feeling after having been sat down for so long, of being very busy’

He adds that another impact of lockdown is that there is now a “bottleneck effect”, whereby work that has been delayed for months is suddenly all happening at once.

He says: “Things that we planned three months ahead got pushed back into things we planned six months ahead, which were then pushed into things we planned nine months ahead.” However, he’s trying to make the most of the situation. “I know it will fall off, so I’m enjoying the feeling after having been sat down for so long, of being very busy.”

Lester is conscious that he is in a small bracket of successful, established stars who not only have regular jobs and savings to support them, but know that work is likely to keep coming in. The next few years will be much more difficult for those at the other end of the industry.

“I do worry about people who are just starting in the profession, and freelancers struggling to make ends meet,” he says. “And there are lots of linked industries that are struggling too.” Young people in particular will need “all the help they can get”, not just in terms of establishing careers but also accessing arts and culture. “We need to continue to make sure that we are completely inclusive when looking for our audiences,” he says.

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Nurturing young talent

Appointed a CBE for services to drama last year (following his OBE in 2013), Lester has used his profile to back a number of charitable causes on this front. His patronages include the National Youth Arts Trust, which is dedicated to widening cultural participation, and the Cowrie Scholarship Foundation, which aims to fund 100 disadvantaged Black British students through UK universities in the next decade.

He bemoans the near-disappearance of student grants and ever-increasing cost of fees as a barrier. “All of us pay enough as a society to ensure that [education] still works for our young people. There is no reason why that should be taken away. If talent exists, and it’s very young, it needs to be nurtured and given a pathway to walk along before you ask it to support itself. That’s how any great society should work.”

‘People used to remark on your colour when you played certain roles – now, they’re thinking about character’

But he adds that some things have fundamentally improved since he was starting out. “However hard people might think it is now for someone from my background, it was much harder then. People weren’t interested, people weren’t looking, people would remark on your colour when you stepped in to take a certain role – it would be newsworthy. Now, thankfully, that isn’t the case. People are thinking about character rather than colour.”

That is in no small part thanks to him, Sapani and many others of their generation – and he has a stark warning for anyone who thinks this hard-fought-for openness might be reversed as a result of the pandemic: “If you are not continually nurturing our young people and opening the door to them, then you are choking the bloodline of this industry.”

Returning to New York to appear on Broadway

Lester’s next big milestone will be his Broadway debut, in the return of Sam Mendes’ hit National Theatre production of The Lehman Trilogy. Charting the founding members and descendants of the notorious banking dynasty, Stefano Massini’s play will reopen at the Nederlander Theatre in October, having played a pre-pandemic run at New York’s Park Avenue Armory.

He is stepping into the role created by Ben Miles, and joins original cast members Simon Russell Beale and Adam Godley. Mendes has said he first approached Lester at the beginning of the project, but scheduling conflicts counted him out, so it feels apt that he is finally able to be a part of the show.

Lester, who won an Olivier last time he was in a Mendes production – of Stephen Sondheim’s Company in 1996 – concurs. “We’ve been trying to find an excuse to work together ever since Company and it hasn’t quite worked out. So I’m very excited about being able to jump into The Lehman Trilogy. I saw it in the West End before it went to New York for the first time and I thought it was fantastic. There’s something that happens whenever I see a brilliant show, where I just want to get up on stage. This was definitely one of those productions.”

As a three-hander running at more than three hours long, there will be nowhere to hide – as with Hymn. But Lester is relishing the challenge. He says: “I think it’s fantastic to be able to twist and play so many different characters one after another. And to create such an epic piece of theatre with just three people… amazing.”

‘If you are not continually nurturing young people, then you are choking the bloodline of this industry’

Although it will mark his first time on Broadway, it’s not his first performance in New York. Lester’s portrayal of Ira Aldridge in Red Velvet at St Ann’s Warehouse in 2014 caused the New York Times’ critic Ben Brantley to gush: “The layers – of style, technique and emotion – that Mr Lester brings to this particular scene are so intricate and so many that you’ll have trouble wrapping your mind around them.”

The play, also by Chakrabarti, originated at the Tricycle (now Kiln) Theatre in 2012 and has since enjoyed a number of revivals, especially in the US. Lester says he and his wife were “shocked” that, having studied at RADA and becoming established classical actors, they had never heard mention of Aldridge.

Thanks to Red Velvet, that shouldn’t be the case for the next generation, as it is now part of the education syllabus. This is clearly a source of enormous pride. “It’s part of what students will study and will help them reimagine what they’ve been told of the past, of the great actors and how we did theatre and so on. I don’t think anything else has had quite the same impact as [the play] when it comes to sharing his story,” says Lester.

Will he revisit the role of Aldridge? “The play is being done a lot, in drama schools and elsewhere, and the great thing about that is it creates a buzz which means people are still sniffing around the possibility [of future productions]. I’d love for it to be on Broadway, I’d love for it to be on screen, and that is all being talked about. So we just have to wait and see,” he says.

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Future plans

As for other projects in the pipeline, Lester says he would love to expand his directing experience, having cut his teeth with an episode of the BBC’s Hustle in 2012 and subsequently on Sky Atlantic’s Riviera – in both instances he was also in front of the camera.

“I think [directing] makes me a better actor,” he says. “Also, as an artist, you have to promote the kind of work you want to see. You only get so far waiting for others to do that for you. In future I want to not only be a part of work that I’m proud of, I want to have a part in creating the work that I’m proud of.”

And for someone who has played a number of the canonical roles – Hamlet, Henry V, Othello – what is still on his wish list? He mentions two roles in productions he has previously appeared in.

I’d love to do another musical – I cut my teeth on Sondheim’

One is Troy Maxson in August Wilson’s Fences, which was one of his first productions out of drama school – he played Cory opposite Yaphet Kotto’s Troy in the West End in 1990. The other is the title role in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, in which he previously played Anthony Hope at the National in 1994.

“I’d love to do another musical, and I cut my teeth on Sondheim,” he adds – it’s certainly no stretch to imagine he would make a cracking Demon Barber of Fleet Street. But despite teasing “there are a few things sort of bubbling away”, nothing is confirmed at the moment.

Having spoken about young people needing pathways, does he have any advice for actors wishing to follow his own career trajectory? “Don’t take no for an answer,” he says. “A hundred noes don’t matter if you can find the one person who says yes. That one person is all that counts. So go for it, and find them.”

CV Adrian Lester

Born: Birmingham, 1968
Training: RADA
Landmark productions:
Theatre:
• Fences, Garrick Theatre, London (1990)
• As You Like It, Cheek by Jowl (1991)
• Company, Donmar Warehouse (1995); Albery Theatre (1996)
• Hamlet, Young Vic (2001)
• Henry V, National Theatre (2003)
• Red Velvet, Tricycle Theatre (2012)
• Othello, NT (2013)
Film:
• Primary Colors (1998)
TV:
• Hustle, BBC (2004-12)
• Riviera, Sky Atlantic (2017-20)
Awards:
• Olivier award for best actor in a musical for Company (1996)
• Evening Standard award for best actor for Othello, jointly with Rory Kinnear (2013)
Agent: Sue Latimer at ARG

Hymn runs at London’s Almeida Theatre from July 26 to August 13, with press performances on July 29